Testing a Prostate Cancer Educational Intervention in High-Burden Neighborhoods

Abstract

To better capitalize on our enhanced understanding of prostate cancer (PCa) risk factors, it is important to better understand how knowledge and attitudes contribute to ethnic disparities in PCa outcomes. The goal of this study was to test the impact of a targeted PCa educational intervention vs. a healthy lifestyle educational control intervention on levels of knowledge, concern, and intention to screen for PCa.We recruited 239 men from neighborhoods with the highest PCa burden in Philadelphia. We assigned 118 men from two of the neighborhoods to the control group 121 men from 2 other neighborhoods to the intervention group. Repeated outcome assessment measures were obtained by administering the survey at baseline, post-session, 1 month post-session, and 4 months post-session.We conducted descriptive statistics to characterize the study sample and linear mixed effect regression models to analyze the intervention's effect on the outcomes. At baseline, we observed no differences in the outcomes between the PCa-targeted intervention and healthy lifestyle control groups.We found that knowledge of PCa and intention to screen increased significantly over time for both the control and intervention groups (p ≤ 0.01 at the 4-month follow-up). In contrast, change in the level of PCa concern was only significant for the intervention group immediately post-session and at 1-month follow-up (p = 0.04 and p = 0.01, respectively).This study showed that gathering at-risk men for discussions about PCa or other health concerns may increase their PCa knowledge and intention to talk to a doctor about PCa screening.

Keywords: Intervention; Knowledge; Prostate cancer; Screening.