Four months after former U.S. President Joe Biden left the White House in January 2025, his office announced he had received a diagnosis of aggressive prostate cancer. Immediately, social media users (archived, archived, archived) and public detractors, including President Donald Trump, suggested Biden received a diagnosis while in office and hid it from the American public. Dozens of Snopes readers also inquired as to the timing of Biden's diagnosis.
(X user @quay_dr)
Biden's disclosure of his diagnosis came around the time a book by journalists Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson published, titled, "Original Sin: President Biden's Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again." In it, the authors claimed Biden's office attempted to hide the extent of Biden's "serious decline."
In a news conference on May 19, Trump further suggested Biden may have hidden test results from the public. "I think it's very sad, actually. I'm surprised that the public wasn't notified a long time ago because to get to Stage 9 [sic], that's a long time," Trump said. At minute 3:00, he added, "Somebody is not telling the facts." (For the record, there is no such thing as "Stage 9 cancer"; Biden received a Stage 4 diagnosis.)
Biden's office rebut
Certain questions persist. For example, given the importance of the president's health, why didn't Biden's medical team regularly screen him for one of the most common types of cancer among older men? Why wasn't it caught earlier? Below, we break down what we know about the timing of Biden's diagnosis, how quickly Biden's cancer could have spread, and whether law requires U.S. presidents to disclose information about their health to the American public.
Why didn't Biden's medical team catch the cancer earlier?
The cancer had already spread to the former president's bones at the time his illness was announced, meaning the disease was aggressive and likely incurable at that point. Biden's detractors claimed he should have received regular screenings for prostate cancer, which is the second most common form of cancer in American men next to skin cancer (which Biden has also received treatment for in the past). The truth is a little more complicated.
According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the most common risk factor for prostate cancer is age. "The older a man is, the greater the chance of getting prostate cancer," its website reads. The American Cancer Society posits that "most prostate cancers are found in men over the age of 65."
Biden received testing after he reported "increasing urinary symptoms." If he hadn't shown physical symptoms, it's unlikely he would have undergone PSA testing or caught the cancer.
So then why would the U.S. president — who turned 82 in November 2024 and was the oldest serving U.S. president in history — have skipped this test for more than a decade as he got older?
There are a number of factors that can contribute to older individuals not undergoing PSA tests. Biopsies following a positive PSA test can be harmful and lead to bleeding, infection, etc., and only 25% of patients who have biopsies following elevated PSA levels actually have prostate cancer. Treatment (such as radiation) for a positive biopsy result is also significantly taxing on the body, especially for an older individual, and can lead to a number of harms, including a 50% risk of long-term sexual erectile dysfunction and up to a one in six chance of long-term irritable bowel symptoms, according to the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF, or Task Force). The Task Force is an independent, volunteer panel of national experts, according to its website.
Additionally, the government-backed Task Force — which The New York Times, CDC and others cited — recommends against PSA-based screening for prostate cancer in "men 70 years and older." This is because, while the risk of prostate cancer peaks above age 75, according to the CDC, there is a competing risk of other causes of death and life expectancy is, on the whole, not higher than the typical time it would take for the cancer to physically affect an individual.
The reasoning the Task Force gave in 2018 is as follows:
PSA-based screening for prostate cancer leads to the diagnosis of prostate cancer in some men whose cancer would never have become symptomatic during their lifetime. Treatment of these men results in harms and provides them with no benefit. This is known as overdiagnosis, and follow-up of large randomized trials suggests that 20% to 50% of men diagnosed with prostate cancer through screening may be overdiagnosed.3 Overdiagnosis rates would be expected to increase with age and to be highest in men 70 years and older because older men have high risk of death from competing causes.
Not all doctors agree with this suggestion, especially as the life expectancy ceiling continues to rise. The American Cancer Society suggests that doctors not test individuals with a life expectancy of less than 10 years for prostate cancer. It does not specify an exact age.
"[Biden] could be receiving the best medical care that we have to offer as a nation and not be screened for prostate cancer," Dr. Michael Morris, a Memorial Sloan Kettering oncologist who specializes in treating prostate cancer, told USA Today in a story on May 20, 2025. "Excellent care means not under-testing. It also means not over-testing."
In 2019, Biden received a diagnosis of benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH), a nonthreatening overgrowth of prostate cells common in older men. According to the Canadian Cancer Society, BPH does not increase the risk of prostate cancer.
Despite the risks associated with biopsies and treatment, many individuals do choose to undergo testing anyway. A number of factors can influence this decision, including genetic predisposition, resources available or out of an abundance of caution. Former presidents have published their PSA results, given that their health is a matter of national interest. Trump, who is 78, has received regular PSA screenings. His last report, published in April 2025, shows his PSA level was normal. Former President Barack Obama also published his PSA test results while in office.
At what rate does prostate cancer develop?
The X post displayed above — which had accumulated more than 5.6 million views as of this writing — claimed that "for even with the most aggressive form, it is a 5-7 year journey without treatment before it becomes metastatic." (Metastatic means that the cancer has spread from the primary site to other places in the body.)
Biden scored a level 9 out of 10 on the Gleason scale, which means that the prostate cancer cells look very different from healthy cells, according to the Cleveland Clinic. The higher the score, the more aggressive and lethal the cancer.
Prostate cancer cells develop at different rates. While it is true that prostate cancer can develop very slowly — so slowly that an individual is more likely to die from another cause before the cancer cells metastasize — that is not always the case. "Most high-grade prostate cancers are also born that way and will behave aggressively," Dr. Marc B. Garnick, a prostate cancer specialist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center said in a story for Harvard Health Publishing.
The X post claimed that "it would be malpractice for this patient to show up and be first diagnosed with metastatic disease in May 2025." However, based on the medical considerations enumerated above, such a late diagnosis
Does law require US presidents to report health conditions?
U.S. law does not require presidents to disclose details regarding their health to the public, though it is not uncommon to do so. Multiple U.S. presidents throughout history have kept details of their personal health from the public, including former President Woodrow Wilson, who hid the results of a stroke from the public from 1919 through the end of his presidency in 1921, and former President John F. Kennedy, who hid multiple diseases, including Addison's disease, from the public to maintain his youthful image.
Alleged signs of Biden's
In the lead-up to the 2024 presidential election, Harris made her medical information public in an effort to draw attention to
In sum …
A Biden spokesperson claimed the former president's most recent test for prostate cancer took place in 2014, when he was 71 or 72. Although the risk of prostate cancer increases with age, the American Cancer Society suggests doctors not test men with a life expectancy of less than 10 years for prostate cancer, given the harms associated with treatment and the likelihood that an individual over a certain age is prone to die from other competing factors before prostate cancer poses a serious risk to their life.
The U.S. Preventive Services Task Force more specifically suggests that men over the age of 70 skip testing altogether. Given the aggressiveness of Biden's cancer, it's possible the cancerous cells developed more recently and metastasized at a faster rate, but it's impossible to know the details without publicly available test records. U.S. law doesn't require presidents to disclose details regarding their health to the public, though it is not uncommon to do so. Biden's health in particular, as the oldest serving president in U.S. history, drew extra scrutiny.