Prostate Puzzle

Prostate Puzzle
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A primary care background

Trained on three continents, Vijayakumar earned his medical degree at SV University in Tirupati, India, and completed his surgical and radiation oncology training at the University of Madras in Madras, India. He completed a second residency in radiation oncology at Michael Reese Hospital and Medical Center, where he was chief resident for two years. He received additional training in brachytherapy, also known as radioactive seed implant therapy, in France.

Vijayakumar traces his prevention focus to his years as an oncology resident in India. Medical residents were paid 300 rupees a month, or about $30, roughly half the income a single person needed to live. To make ends meet, Vijayakumar ran a 24-hour primary care clinic, charging impoverished patients three rupees a visit, or about 30 cents, and wealthy patients about 100 rupees. He hired another physician to staff the clinic during the day, staffing it himself nights and weekends — stitching up knife wounds, tending to patients with tuberculosis, and making house calls to care for typhoid patients. “That background,” he says, “made me see the value of prevention.”

Upon arriving in the United States, the young doctor who once overcharged his rich patients to subsidize the poor ones was dismayed to find that social disparities in health care also existed here.

African-American men are diagnosed with prostate cancer at more advanced stages of the disease than white men, and are twice as likely to die of the disease.

For Vijayakumar, a focus on prostate cancer — preventing it, and finding out why black men suffer disproportionately from it -— came naturally.

Soon after settling in Chicago, he began visiting African-American churches on the city’s South Side on Sundays, preaching prostate cancer awareness and early detection. During the week, when he wasn’t treating patients or teaching medicine, he pursued his prostate cancer population and prevention research, along with more traditional radiation oncology studies. Over the past decade, Vijayakumar has published more than a dozen scientific articles on prostate cancer and race.

“Why is the incidence of prostate cancer higher among African-American men? Why is the overall outcome poorer in African-American prostate cancer patients? These are open questions,” Vijayakumar says. “We have to answer them.”