Prostate cancer in New York City: impact of neighborhood level social determinants of care

Social determinants of health may impact prostate cancer presentation. Since neighborhoods may influence adjacent neighborhoods across often porous and arbitrary borders, we performed generalized spatial two stage least squares cross sections regression to assess direct and indirect (via adjacent neighborhoods) impact of neighborhood level independent variables. Using the New York State Public Access Cancer Epidemiology Data and the NYC Open neighborhood-level dataset, we discovered a direct association between Race and poverty with the likelihood of presenting with advanced prostate cancer. There were no indirect impacts of neighborhood variables, indicating the need to directly target neighborhoods to improve outcomes.