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Purpose: Little is known about the detailed spectrum of the cause of death associated with prostate cancer (PCa). This study systematically characterized the cause of death among patients with PCa. Methods: Patients aged 40 years and older with primary PCa were identified from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results program. Mortality rates were estimated. Standardized mortality ratios (SMRs) of non-cancer deaths were calculated to evaluate the risk of death and to compare with the cancer-free population. Results: This study included 1,170,489 patients with PCa. There were 501,262 deaths, of which27.4%were due toPCa and57.0%were due tonon-cancer causes. Non-cancer deaths increased over time from 1975 to 2016, and index cancer death decreased continually. The risk of non-cancer deathswas 1.45 times (SMR, 1.45;95%confidence interval [CI], 1.45-1.46) that of the general population. Cardiovascular diseasewas the most common non-cancer cause of death, accounting for 30.2% of all deaths among PCa patients. Alzheimer's disease (SMR, 3.92; 95% CI, 3.85-4.00) had the highest risk of death. The mortality rate and SMR of noncancer deaths increased with increased follow-up after diagnosis. Conclusion: Instead of the index cancer, non-cancer comorbidities were the leading cause of death among patients with PCa, and the risk of non-cancer deaths was much higher than among the general population. Clinicians and researchers should be aware of this trend to conduct timely and targeted interventions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disparities in healthcare access and utilization associated with demographic and socioeconomic status hinder advancement of health equity. Thus, we designed a novel equity-focused approach to quantify variations of healthcare access/utilization from the expectation in national target populations. We additionally applied survey-weighted logistic regression models, to identify factors associated with usage of a particular type of health care. To facilitate generation of analysis datasets, we built an National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) knowledge graph to help automate source-level dynamic analyses across different survey years and subjects' characteristics. We performed a cross-sectional subgroup disparity analysis of 2013-2018 NHANES on U.S. adults for receipt of diabetes treatments and vaccines against Hepatitis A (HAV), Hepatitis B (HBV), and Human Papilloma (HPV). Results show that in populations with hemoglobin A1c level ≥6%, patients with non-private insurance were less likely to receive newer and more beneficial antidiabetic medications; being Asian further exacerbated these disparities. For widely used drugs such as insulin, Asians experienced insignificant disparities in odds of prescription compared to White patients but received highly inadequate treatments with regard to their distribution in U.S. diabetic population. Vaccination rates were associated with some demographic/socioeconomic factors but not the others at different degrees for different diseases. For instance, while equity scores increase with rising education levels for HBV, they decrease with rising wealth levels for HPV. Among women vaccinated against HPV, minorities and poor communities usually received Cervarix while non-Hispanic White and higher-income groups received the more comprehensive Gardasil vaccine. Our study identified and quantified the impact of determinants of healthcare utilization for antidiabetic medications and vaccinations. Our new methods for semantics-aware disparity analysis of NHANES data could be readily generalized to other public health goals to support more rapid identification of disparities and development of policies, thus advancing health equity., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist., (Copyright: © 2023 Qi et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)