In today’s New York Times Health Section, RONI RABIN includes prostate cancer in a list of men’s health conditions that get less than a fair share of attention and research dollars compared with women’s health conditions:

“Cancer also strikes men disproportionately: one in three women at some point in life; one in two men. In part, that is a result of the fact that more men than women smoke, and possibly of occupational exposures.

But experts and advocates say that when it comes to government financing for the most common sex-specific reproductive cancers, breast cancer financing exceeds prostate cancer financing by more than 40 percent, with prostate cancer research receiving $394 million in 2005, and breast cancer receiving $710 million. The figures, for financing by the National Cancer Institute and Defense Department, were provided by the not-for-profit Prostate Cancer Foundation.

More women die of breast cancer than men do of prostate cancer: some 40,970 women will die of breast cancer this year, compared with 27,350 deaths of men from prostate cancer, according to the American Cancer Society.

Breast cancer also strikes young people more often. But men’s chances of receiving a prostate cancer diagnosis at some point in their lifetimes are high, with about 234,460 new cases expected to be diagnosed this year, compared with 212,920 new cases of breast cancer.

Nevertheless, said Dr. Peter Scardino, a prostate cancer surgeon and chairman of the department of surgery at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, “there are still more people doing research on breast cancer than on prostate cancer, there’s more industry support for research on breast cancer drugs, there’s been more attention to the quality of life effects of breast cancer and we have more-effective chemotherapy agents for breast cancer because more trials have been done.”

More: Health Disparities Persist for Men, and Doctors Ask Why, New York Times November 14, 2006 (registration may be required).