2025

Los Angeles Times | "Cancer diagnosis and a new book fuel questions about Biden’s decision to run in 2024"


Dr. Mark Litwin, UCLA Fielding School professor of Health Policy and Management, was interviewed by the Los Angeles Times about prostate cancer.

Los Angeles Times story on prostate cancer and President Biden

Dr. Mark Litwin, UCLA Fielding School professor in the Department of Health Policy and Management and professor and chair of the Department of Urology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, was interviewed by the Los Angeles Times about prostate cancer.

"... Some specialists in the field said it was possible, if rare, for (former President) Biden’s cancer to emerge and spread since his last physical in the White House. Roughly 10% of patients who are newly diagnosed with prostate cancer are found with an advanced form of the disease that has metastasized to other parts of the body.

Dr. Mark Litwin, the chair of UCLA Urology, said it is in the nature of aggressive prostate cancers to grow quickly. “So it is likely that this tumor began more recently,” he said.

Litwin said he does not doubt that Biden would have been screened for elevated PSA levels. But, he said, he could be among those patients whose cancers do not produce elevated PSA levels or whose more aggressive cancers rapidly grow and metastasize within a matter of months.

“The fact that he has metastatic disease at diagnosis, to me, as an expert in the area and as a clinician taking care of guys with prostate cancer all the time, just says that he is unfortunate,” Litwin said."

Read the Los Angeles Times article.

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