Former President Joe Biden has been diagnosed with an “aggressive form” of prostate cancer that has spread, his personal office said in a statement May 18.
Joe Biden is facing a major health battle.
The former President of the United States, 82, was recently diagnosed with an “aggressive form” of prostate cancer that has spread to his bones, his personal office said
“Last week, President Joe Biden was seen for a new finding of a prostate nodule after experiencing increasing urinary symptoms,” read the May 18 announcement, obtained by NBC News. “On Friday he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, characterized by a Gleason score of 9 (Grade Group 5) with metastasis to the bone.”
The statement continued, “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.”
A source familiar with Biden and his family’s thinking told NBC News that “multiple” treatment options are being considered, include hormone treatment.
His spokesperson had disclosed May 13 that a “small nodule” was found on Biden’s prostate during a routine exam, “which necessitated further evaluation,” the outlet reported.
The news comes almost four months after Biden ended his term in January. During his time as President, he drew concerns about his age and health, despite doctor declaring him “fit for duty” in February after a routine physical exam at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.
Biden stepped down as the Democratic Party’s 2024 presidential candidate last July, after which then-Vice President Kamala Harris took his place to begin campaigning against Donald Trump, who was voted President for the second time in the November election.
“Melania and I are saddened to hear about Joe Biden’s recent medical diagnosis,” the U.S. leader wrote on Truth Social in response to the news on behalf of himself and First Lady Melania Trump. “We extend our warmest and best wishes to Jill and the family, and we wish Joe a fast and successful recovery.”
While Biden has largely kept out of the spotlight since leaving office as the oldest serving president in U.S. history, he recently gave a couple of rare interviews. In early May, Biden and wife Jill Biden appeared on The View, during which he responded to reports that he had suffered cognitive decline in his final year in office.
“They are wrong. There’s nothing to sustain that,” he said. “The only reason I got out of the race is because I didn’t want to have a divided Democratic Party.”
Biden also spoke to the BBC, noting that didn’t think passing the baton to Harris any earlier “would have mattered” when it came to the outcome of the election.
One month earlier, Biden spoke at a conference hosted by the Advocates, Counselors, and Representatives for the Disabled (ACRD) and also made a rare public appearance at Pope Francis‘ funeral in Italy, along with his wife.
Look back at the Bidens’ family tree.
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First Lady Jill Biden
Widowed at 30 when his first wife Neilia Hunter Biden was killed in a car crash along with their 13-month-old daughter Naomi in 1972, then-freshman Sen. Joe Biden focused on raising their sons, Beau Biden and Hunter Biden, and put romance on the back burner.
Really, it wasn’t even on the stove until Joe’s younger brother Frank Biden gave him Jill Jacobs‘ phone number a few years later.
“She gave me back my life,” Joe wrote of finding love again with the future first lady in his 2007 memoir Promises to Keep. “She made me start to think my family might be whole again.”
Joe and Jill married on June 17, 1977.
Son Beau Biden
The president frequently invokes his late son, Joseph R. “Beau” Biden III, a former Army major and two-term Delaware attorney general who died of glioblastoma in 2015 at the age of 46.
“Beau had a strict code of honor,” Joe told the New York Times upon the release of his 2017 memoir Promise Me, Dad. “That may sound silly, but it’s true. My dad had an expression: ‘Never explain and never complain.’ I never once heard Beau complain. Not once.”
He recalled a night toward the end of Beau’s life when, Joe said, his son “had come face to face with his mortality. He watched me go through the loss of his mother and sister. And he didn’t want me to turn inward. He didn’t want me to give up on the robustness of life.”
Speaking at at a National Guard/Army Reserve center named after his son the day before his inauguration in January 2020, Joe said how proud he was to be from Delaware.
“And I am even more proud to be standing here doing this from the Major Beau Biden facility,” he added. “Ladies and gentlemen, I only have one regret: He’s not here. Because we should be introducing him as president.”
Beau’s Widow Hallie Biden
Beau married Hallie Biden (née Olivere) in 2002. They welcomed daughter Natalie Naomi Biden in 2004 and son Robert Hunter Biden II in 2006.
Joe ultimately decided not to run for president in 2016 in the wake of Beau’s death, but Hallie’s dad Ron Olivere told Delaware’s News Journal that Joe consulted his daughter before he even considered it.
“Her response,” Ron said, “was, ‘Pop, we’re behind you all the way. We’re behind you 100 percent.’”
Granddaughter Natalie Biden
“Thanksgiving I think is all of our favorite holiday,” Natalie, who was 10 when her dad passed away, said on TODAY before her grandfather’s inauguration in January 2020. “Because we usually go to Nantucket…[cousin] Maisy and I and my grandpa and my uncle and my dad… we used to do a Polar Bear plunge in Nantucket in November.”
She graduated from St. Andrew’s School (where some of Dead Poets Society was shot) in Middletown, Del., in 2023 and enrolled at her dad’s alma mater, University of Pennsylvania.
Natalie attended a May 2024 State Dinner for the president of Kenya with date Rafael Hajjar.
Grandson Robert Hunter Biden II
Beau and Hallie’s son, who’s named after his uncle and goes by Hunter, is leading a relatively private life, but he’s been present for major family events (i.e. inaugurations).
During a CNN townhall with Anderson Cooper in March 2020, Joe shared that Beau’s kids lived near him and Jill in Delaware and—with social distancing the order of the day at the time—”we sit on our back porch and they sit out on the lawn with two chairs there, and we talk about everything that is going on in their day. And talk about being home from school, and who’s driving whom crazy, and so on.”
The president and first lady also attended their grandson’s confirmation in 2021 at the family’s longtime church, St. Joseph on the Brandywine.
Son Hunter Biden
Born Robert Hunter Biden on Feb. 4, 1970, the Yale Law School graduate has been candid about his battle with substance abuse and other personal struggles.
In June 2024, he was found guilty of two counts of lying about his drug use on a federal background check form to obtain a firearm and one count of possessing a gun while addicted to, or using, illegal drugs, all felonies. Prior to his dad’s Dec. 1 pardon, he was facing a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison.
Hunter also pled guilty to tax-avoidance charges in September.
Under a cloud of negative headlines, Hunter was absent from most of his father’s campaign events in 2020.
“Beau and I have been there since we were carried in baskets during his first campaign,” Hunter told the New Yorker in 2019. “We went everywhere with him. At every single major event and every small event that had to do with his political career, I was there. I’ve never missed a rally for my dad. The notion that I’m not standing next to him in Philadelphia, next to the Rocky statue, it’s heartbreaking for me. It’s killing me and it’s killing him. Dad says, ‘Be here.’ Mom says, ‘Be here.’ But at what cost?”
Hunter—who spoke remotely during the Democratic National Convention in August 2020, when his father officially accepted his party’s nomination—was there in person on Nov. 7 for the president-elect’s victory speech in Wilmington.
And despite his troubles, Hunter remains one of the president’s closest advisors.
Hunter’s Ex-Wife Kathleen Buhle
The Yale Law School graduate married Kathleen Buhle in 1993 and they share three daughters: Naomi King Biden, born Dec. 23, 1993; Finnegan Biden, born Sept. 9, 2000; and Maisy Biden, born in 2001.
The couple split up in 2015, with Kathleen citing drug use and infidelity among her husband’s shortcomings in her subsequent divorce filing.
Hunter went on to have a relationship with his brother Beau’s widow. “Hallie and I are incredibly lucky to have found the love and support we have for each other in such a difficult time, and that’s been obvious to the people who love us most,” he said in a statement to Page Six when that news got out in March 2017. “We’ve been so lucky to have family and friends who have supported us every step of the way.”
Granddaughter Naomi Biden
Hunter’s eldest child did her undergraduate work at Penn before attending Columbia Law School. She’s an associate at Arnold & Porter.
(And because it’s a small world after all, Naomi and Tiffany Trump were at Penn together—future presidents Donald Trump and Biden both attended their graduation in 2016—and Tiffany shared a photo of herself and Naomi hanging out in the Hamptons in the summer of 2018.)
Naomi has said her grandpa—who served two terms as Barack Obama‘s vice president—would pick up the phone for one of his grandkids anytime, anywhere.
“He’ll be onstage, giving a speech, and we’d call him and he’d be like, ‘What’s wrong?!’” she shared on PBS Newshour in August 2020.
Naomi and now-husband Peter Neal lived with her grandparents at the White House for a few months while planning their Nov. 19, 2022, wedding on the South Lawn.
“I try to remind myself it’s the White House,” Naomi told Vogue after her nuptials, “but it also gets normalized over time.”
On election day Nov. 5, Naomi announced she and her husband were expecting their first child.
Granddaughter Finnegan Biden
Hunter and Kathleen named their second child after his paternal grandmother, Catherine Eugenia “Jean” Finnegan.
She graduated from University of Pennsylvania in 2021 and has been a fixture at a number of high-profile events in D.C. and abroad, including in April 2023 when she accompanied grandma Jill to the coronation of King Charles III.
Granddaughter Maisy Biden
The president and first lady were in attendance when Hunter and Kathleen’s youngest child graduated from Penn in 2023.
While sister Finnegan’s Instagram is private, you can check out Maisie’s artwork and other glimpses from her life on her public account.
She also enjoys a structured suit, sporting a dark jacket and trousers paired with Air Jordans at her grandfather’s inauguration and a Brooks Brothers pinstripe at an October 2023 White House State Dinner for the prime minister of Australia.
Hunter Biden’s Wife Melissa Cohen
In May 2019, Hunter married filmmaker Melissa Cohen of South Africa in a rooftop ceremony in Los Angeles after a weeks-long courtship.
According to the New Yorker, just days after their first date, Hunter had “shalom” (Hebrew for hello, goodbye and peace) tattooed on the inside of his left bicep to match Melissa’s ink. A few days after that, on May 15, he proposed.
She said yes the next morning, he bought wedding bands and a marriage service sent over an officiant.
“I called my dad and said that we just got married,” Hunter told the magazine. “He was on speaker, and he said to her, ‘Thank you for giving my son the courage to love again.’ And he said to me, ‘Honey, I knew that when you found love again that I’d get you back.’ And my reply was, I said, ‘Dad, I always had love. And the only thing that allowed me to see it was the fact that you never gave up on me, you always believed in me.’”
Grandson Beau Biden
Hunter and Melissa welcomed son Joseph Robinette “Beau” Biden IV on March 28, 2020.
Granddaughter Navy Roberts
Hunter was sued for child support in 2019 by Lunden Alexis Roberts, who said the embattled first son was the father of her daughter Navy, who was born in August 2018.
He at first denied having a sexual relationship with Lunden, but in January 2020 an Arkansas judge signed off on an order of paternity, a DNA test having proved that he was the child’s biological dad.
Hunter subsequently agreed to pay an undisclosed amount of monthly child support, according to CNBC.
Acknowledging that he actually had seven grandchildren for the first time, the president said in a statement to People, “Our son Hunter and Navy’s mother, Lunden, are working together to foster a relationship that is in the best interests of their daughter, preserving her privacy as much as possible going forward.”
He continued, “This is not a political issue, it’s a family matter. Jill and I only want what is best for all of our grandchildren, including Navy.”
Ashley Biden
Joe and Jill Biden welcomed daughter Ashley Blazer Biden, their only child together, on June 9, 1981.
The Tulane grad got her master’s degree in social work from University of Pennsylvania’s School of Social Policy and Practice in 2010 and was associate director of the Delaware Center for Justice for more than seven years.
“We have to sometimes be pulled all the way down to shoot forward,” Ashley explained to The Lily in June 2020. “He was my bow. His cancer brought me to my knees. I had no choice but to shoot forward, keep going, keep aiming at my own dreams.”
“I’m extremely proud of her,” Joe told E! News when she debuted the line at New York Fashion Week. “She’s been trying to change the world since she’s been 3 years old, and I think she’s going to do it.”
Ashley told TODAY she planned to use her platform as first daughter “to advocate for social justice, for mental health, to be involved in community development and revitalization.”
When it comes to dealing with the vitriol directed at her family, especially her dad and brother Hunter, she told Elle in 2023, “The real flex is staying kind no matter how cruel the world gets.”
Not that she didn’t get angry. “I think it’s human nature when anybody that you love dearly is attacked,” she added, “wrong stuff is out there that is just complete BS.”
Son-in-Law Howard Krein
The doctor asked his future father-in-law for his permission (granted) and asked Ashley to marry him at sunset atop a cliff in Big Sur, Calif. He and Ashley wed in June 2012 in an interfaith Catholic and Jewish ceremony at the same church in Delaware where she was baptized.
“I think to myself, aw, God, my little girl! This can’t have passed so quick,” Joe told People before the wedding. But, he added, “This is the right guy. And he’s getting a helluva woman.”
Sister Valerie Biden
Joe is the eldest of four siblings, and sister Valerie Biden Owens has been a familiar figure on (all the) campaign trails in her brother’s life. In fact, she’s been his closest political advisor for almost half a century.
“We all know him as a great talker,” she told Axios in an interview after her big brother was declared the winner of the 2020 election. “I mean: There goes Biden again—as I’m doing right now—talking and talking. But my brother’s even a better listener.”
Asked what she’d call him once he officially became president, Valerie said, “Joey. Joe.” Or, “if he calls me First Sister, I’ll call him Mr. President.”
A Moment to Remember for the Whole Family
“Anyone who wants to get to @JoeBiden, will have to get past us first…We may not look intimidating, but remember, our Nana is @DrBiden…” Naomi tweeted Oct. 22, 2020, as the presidential campaign entered the homestretch.
And she later shared a photo of the eldest grandkids hugging their grandpa when they found out he had won the election on the morning of Nov. 7, 2020.
Source: www.eonline.com