Clarifying the Positive Association Between Education and Prostate Cancer

Abstract

Using the 1993-2011 data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study ( N = 5,218), we examine prostate cancer screening, mortality after the diagnosis, and health behaviors as potential mechanisms explaining the paradoxical association between men’s higher education and higher prostate cancer risk. Our study combines within-cohort longitudinal hazard models predicting a prostate cancer diagnosis with Monte Carlo simulations estimating the joint effects of socioeconomic differences in prostate cancer screening and mortality after the diagnosis. Our findings strongly suggest that higher utilization of prostate cancer screening and lower mortality after the diagnosis are important explanations for higher prostate rates among more educated men. In addition to applying an innovative method to the issues of prostate cancer incidence and survival, our results have potentially important implications for the current debate about the utility of prostate cancer screening as well as for accurate predictions of future mortality and morbidity trends in the expanding older population.