Joe Biden’s prostate cancer diagnosis is serious, but according to medical experts, it isn’t necessarily a death sentence, thanks to a range of new treatments. Here’s what doctors say.
representatives for Joe Biden announced that the 82-year-old former president has been diagnosed with metastatic (stage four) prostate cancer. The news, which follows a period of renewed scrutiny of how Biden’s inner circle handled concerns about his age and health during his reelection campaign, has (mostly) prompted an outpouring of support for Biden and his family, and it’s also shone a national spotlight on prostate cancer and how it can be detected and treated. Below is a look at how people in the medical community have responded to his diagnosis.
According to the statement released by Biden’s office, he was diagnosed on Friday following “a new finding of a prostate nodule after experiencing increasing urinary symptoms.” It also noted that the prostate cancer is “characterized by a Gleason score of 9 (Grade Group 5) with metastasis to the bone.” Gleason scores are the grading system for prostate cancer and range from 6 (low grade) to 10 (high grade); Grade 5 means high-grade and refers to how malignant cancerous cells appear to be in the patient’s tissue sample. The statement explained, “While this represents a more aggressive form of the disease, the cancer appears to be hormone-sensitive which allows for effective management. The President and his family are reviewing treatment options with his physicians.”
According to the American Cancer Society, this year nearly 314,000 American men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer, and nearly 36,000 will die from the disease. It’s the second-most common form of cancer (after skin cancer), age is the biggest risk factor, and it’s the second leading cause of cancer death for American men (after lung cancer). On average, the five-year relative survival rate for someone diagnosed with early-stage prostate cancer is nearly 100 percent; for metastatic prostate cancer it’s 37 percent.
But in the aftermath of Biden’s diagnosis, numerous oncologists and urologists have stressed that while his diagnosis is serious and his cancer is considered incurable, it isn’t necessarily a death sentence. As Fox Chase Cancer Center urologist Alexander Kutikov noted in an X post, “in the past 20 years, 5-year survival has improved markedly thanks to better imaging, advanced therapies, and more effective care. Often men live many years — and sometimes decades — with a terrific quality of life.”
Explained American Cancer Society chief science officer William Dahut to the :
He could definitely live many years with this. There’s a wide range of how long people can live with metastatic prostate cancer. In the most aggressive cases, under a year, but there are reports of people living 15 or 20 years, too.
Another expert emphasized how common this ailment is to NBC News:
“Gleason 9 is, by definition, aggressive, but you don’t know how bad it is unless you know what the PET scan looks like,” said Dr. Alan Tan, genitourinary section lead at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, Tennessee. Tan is not involved with Biden’s case. Tan said that this type of prostate cancer is not rare. “This is the most common thing I see in my clinic,” he said. “This is bread-and-butter genitourinary oncology.”
Duke University urologic oncologist Judd Moul spoke with the New York Times:
The first line of attack is to cut off the testosterone that feeds prostate cancer.
