Joe Jackson had a song called “Cancer” on his 1982 Night and Day Album, featuring the lyric “Everything Gives You Cancer.” It seems in this day and age, that truly everything does give you cancer, and if you’re Asian, you’re more likely to get certain types of cancer. AsianWeek recently published some statistics around specific Asian groups and the types of cancer that have a higher incidence in each of those groups.
As a group, Asians have a lower incidence and mortality rates from all cancers combined than all other racial/ethnic groups, but there are certain exceptions. What’s interesting about cancer and how it affects Asian Americans is that it’s very different, based on country of origin.
According to Asianweek, a study of the five largest Asian American groups – Chinese, Filipino, Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese — found colorectal cancer rates are highest among Chinese Americans; prostate cancer is more common and more often deadly among Filipino men; and Vietnamese women have the highest incidence and death rates from cervical cancer.
Studies also indicated that for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, the annual number of deaths from cancer exceeds that for heart disease, making Asians the only major U.S. racial or ethnic group for which this is true. And if you’re a Vietnamese man, you have the most to worry about. A study in California indicated that Vietnamese men have by far the highest incidence and death rates (54.3 and 35.5 per 100,000, respectively) from liver cancer of all the Asian ethnic groups. Their incidence rate is more than seven times higher than the incidence rate among non-Hispanic White men.
So depending on your country of origin, you may want to make sure you’re getting your yearly medical check-up and be sure to let your doctor know if there’s any family history of cancer. In my case, my family fit the Chinese profile all too well. My dad passed away from colorectal cancer, and in the past year I’ve lost my mom and my uncle to cancer as well. One of the difficulties we had when my mom was diagnosed was finding materials on cancer that she could read. In order to make this easier for Asian Americans, the Asian American Network for Cancer Awareness, Research and Training (AANCART), a National Cancer Institute-funded Network, and the American Cancer Society have collaborated to produce a searchable Web portal for Asian language cancer materials. The site serves as a single point of access for cancer education materials translated into more than 12 Asian and Pacific Islander languages.
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5 Comments to “Everything Gives You Cancer”
jeffat8asians wrote:
Wow, talk about fitting the profiles. My dad just got diagnose with early stage prostate cancer, and my father-in-law, also Filipino, got diagnosed with elevated levels of PSA.
Posted on 20-Aug-09 at 5:29 pm | Permalink
timat8asians wrote:
Here at 8asians we received a comment back directly on this article from Grohanver:
“In the article, “Everything Gives You Cancer”, one fact is not consistent with the US Census Bureau's latest updates from the 2007 American Community Survey. The article states that “a study of the five largest Asian American groups – Chinese, Filipino, Vietnamese, Korean and Japanese”. However, Indian Americans are the third-largest Asian American ethnic group with a population of 2,765,815.”
If you reference the article above you'll notice this statistic and definition comes directly from Asianweek. I'm not sure how Asianweek defines “Asian”, but I agree with Grohanver that Indian Americans are indeed one of the largest ethnic group in Asian America. And while I have no statistics on cancer in Indian Americans, any family history of cancer there is a sure warning flag to go and have yourself checked regularly.
Posted on 21-Aug-09 at 8:12 am | Permalink
andrew09 wrote:
Give your dad IP-6. It's dirt cheap. Go to iHerb.com http://www.iherb.com/IP-6
read the reviews. It'll lower his PSA in a snap. Also check his serum ferritin (order through his PCP) before and after the supplementation. Hope they get all well.
( source: I'm a PharmTech )
It's the food, people. Japs and Chinese eat lots of internal organs and raw meat = colon cancer. Viets eat a lot of freshwater fish which have been found to be linked with liver cancer. Operative is *a lot*.
Posted on 21-Aug-09 at 9:39 am | Permalink
Efren Bose wrote:
There's also other issues to consider here too. Asians are notoriously known in the medical community for not seeking help with Western medicine for cancers, etc., until they've exhausted all other alternative and traditional ethnic medicine routes, and by that time, the disease has progressed for so long that it's terminal and incurable. It's really ironic given that so many Asians push their kids to go into the healthcare field, and yet Asian immigrants won't seek care–it also doesn't help if they're monolingual, unable to navigate through the horrendous insurance and cultural issues, and also sense of shame depending on the type of cancer. It also doesn't help that there's high rates of smoking, alcoholism, and other things that help push rates of cancer higher.
AANCART (I used to attend a lecture series set up by them at UCSF when I was doing my PhD work) has done some amazing work trying to get the word out for prevention and treatment, especially given their lack of money. They're an awesome group.
Posted on 21-Aug-09 at 7:23 pm | Permalink
8Asians.com » Cancer: Asians and the Big C wrote:
[...] you’re a regular reader of 8Asians, you already know I lost both my parents to the big C – Cancer. Toan Lam writes this week in the Huffington Post about a phenomenon in [...]
Posted on 13-Nov-09 at 1:15 pm | Permalink
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