Former United States President Joe Biden has been diagnosed with “aggressive” prostate cancer, his office has said in a statement.
Biden was seen last week by doctors after urinary symptoms developed and a prostate nodule was found. He was diagnosed with prostate cancer on Friday, with the cancer cells having spread to the bone, the statement released on Sunday said.
“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”, it added.
The health of the 82-year-old Biden was a key concern among US voters during his time as president and became more so during the 2024 campaign.
After a calamitous debate performance in June 2024, Biden abandoned his bid for a second term. Then-Vice President Kamala Harris became the nominee and lost to Donald Trump, who returned to the White House after a four-year hiatus.
President Trump, a longtime political opponent who has lambasted Biden and continues to blame him for wars and economic ills, posted on social media that he was saddened by the news and “we wish Joe a fast and successful recovery”.
Harris, said on social media that she was keeping him in her family’s “hearts and prayers during this time. Joe is a fighter – and I know he will face this challenge with the same strength, resilience, and optimism that have always defined his life and leadership”.
Pete Buttigieg, who was Biden’s transportation secretary, called the former president “a man of deep faith and extraordinary resilience”.
Biden, a self-proclaimed Zionist, was heavily criticised in some quarters at home and overseas for his unconditional support for Israel in its punishing Gaza war after the Hamas-led October 7 attack, and for not using Washington’s leverage to rein in US ally Israel, as death and devastation wracked Palestinians in Gaza.
In recent days, Biden rejected concerns about his age despite reporting in the new book Original Sin that aides had shielded the public from the extent of his cognitive decline while he served as president.
Some prominent Democratic politicians have recently acknowledged that it was an error to advance Biden as the nominee, one that likely cost them the White House, given the growing concerns among voters about his age, even though Trump was 78 years old at the time of the November election.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll, some time before the debate, showed a majority of Americans, including most Democrats, believed Biden was too old to serve a second term.
“It was a mistake for Democrats to not listen to the voters earlier,” Democratic US Senator Chris Murphy told the NBC News programme Meet the Press on Sunday morning, before Biden’s diagnosis was announced.
Prostate cancers are given a ranking 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.
When prostate cancer spreads to other parts of the body, it often spreads to the bones. Metastasised cancer is much harder to treat than localised cancer because it can be hard for drugs to reach all the tumours and completely root out the disease.
Biden lost a son, Beau Biden, in 2015, to brain cancer.
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