American Indian/Alaska Native Men Less Likely to Receive Prostate Screening

MONDAY, July 3, 2023 (HealthDay News) -- American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) men are less likely to receive a prostate-specific antigen test (PSAT) and/or digital rectal examination (DRE) during physician visits to nonfederal clinics, according to a study published online May 23 in Cancer Causes & Control.

In an effort to examine the proportion of primary care visits in which AI/AN men receive a PSAT and/or DRE, Chris Gillette, Ph.D., from the Wake Forest University School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and colleagues conducted a secondary analysis of the National Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (NAMCS), which sampled nonfederal physician visits during 2013 to 2016 and 2018, and the NAMCS Community Health Center (CHC) datasets, which sampled ambulatory visits at CHCs from 2012 to 2015.

The researchers found that between 2013 and 2016 and in 2018, among AI/AN men, 1.67 per 100 visits included a PSAT and no visits included a DRE. For non-AI/AN men, the rate of PSAT was 9.35 per 100 visits and the rate of DRE was 2.52 per 100 visits. Compared with non-Hispanic White men, AI/AN men were significantly less likely to receive a PSAT (adjusted odds ratio, 0.09). In CHCs, AI/AN men and non-AI/AN men received 4.26 and 5.00 PSAT per 100 visits, respectively, and the rate of DRE was 0.63 and 1.05 per 100 visits, respectively. No statistically significant disparity regarding PSAT or DRE was seen in the CHC data for AI/AN versus non-Hispanic White men.

"What is particularly concerning is that there were zero instances of DREs in the traditional NAMCS over the entire five-year period and there were no PSA tests conducted after 2014," the authors write.

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