Former U.S. president Joe Biden has been diagnosed with prostate cancer, his office said Sunday.
Biden was seen last week by doctors after urinary symptoms, and a prostate nodule was found. He was diagnosed with prostate cancer on Friday, with the cancer cells having spread to the bone.
“While this represents a more aggressive form of the disease, the cancer appears to be hormone-sensitive which allows for effective management,” his office said.
“The president and his family are reviewing treatment options with his physicians.”
Prostate cancers are given a grade called a Gleason score that measures, on a scale of 1 to 10, how the cancerous cells look compared with normal cells. Biden’s score of 9 suggests his cancer is among the most aggressive.
A group of cancer experts say Canadian national screening guidelines are a decade out of date, which is leading to people getting diagnosed later, when they are more difficult to treat.
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 of the tumours 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 tumours 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 2024, while seeking re-election, Biden abandoned his bid for a second term. Kamala Harris, who was his vice-president, 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.
