WASHINGTON – Former President Joe Biden has been diagnosed with prostate cancer, his office said Sunday.
Doctors examined Biden last week after he experienced urinary symptoms, and they discovered a prostate nodule. On Friday, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, and the cancer had already spread to his bones.
“This is a more aggressive type of cancer, but since it is sensitive to hormones, it can be effectively managed,” his office stated. “The President and his family are considering treatment options with the help of his doctors.”
Prostate cancer’s severity is assessed using a Gleason score, which rates how abnormal the cancer cells are on a scale from 1 to 10 compared to normal cells. Biden’s Gleason score was reported as 9, indicating that his cancer is highly aggressive.
When prostate cancer spreads to other parts of the body, it often spreads to the bones. Metastasized cancer is much harder to treat than localized cancer because it can be hard for drugs to reach all the tumors and completely root out the disease.
However, when prostate cancers need hormones to grow, as in Biden’s case, they can be susceptible to treatment that deprives the tumors of hormones.
The health of Biden, 82, was a dominant concern among voters during his time as president. After a calamitous debate performance in June while seeking reelection, Biden abandoned his bid for a second term. Then-Vice President Kamala Harris became the nominee and lost to Republican Donald Trump, who returned to the White House after a four-year hiatus.
But in recent days, Biden rejected concerns about his age despite reporting in the new book “Original Sin” by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson that aides had shielded the public from the extent of his decline while serving as president.
In February 2023, Biden had a skin lesion removed from his chest that was a basal cell carcinoma, a common form of skin cancer. And in November 2021, he had a polyp removed from his colon that was a benign, but potentially pre-cancerous lesion.
In 2022, Biden made a “cancer moonshot” one of his administration’s priorities with the goal of halving the cancer death rate over the next 25 years. The initiative was a continuation of his work as vice president to address a disease that had killed his older son, Beau, who died from brain cancer in 2015.
His father, when announcing the goal to halve the cancer death rate, said this could be an “American moment to prove to ourselves and, quite frankly, the world that we can do really big things.”
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Associated Press writer Jon Fahey in New York contributed to this report.
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