LIMA, Ohio (WLIO) – Former President Joe Biden has announced he was diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer.
Prostate cancer is the most common type of cancer among men, with about 11% of men developing the disease in their lifetime. While it is often slow growing, the stage at which it is detected plays a major role in prognosis. If caught early and confined to the prostate, the five-year survival rate is nearly 100%. Dr. Corry Clinton of Lima Memorial Health System urges men to speak with their primary care providers about when to begin screening.
“It's not the finger test anymore for screening, it's just blood work. It's a lot easier. A lot of people worry about that. Now, if you're having symptoms, symptoms would be difficult to urinating, or you go to urinate and you just get a little bit out, then you have to go again later, having to get up a lot in the middle of the night. Now that's different from screening, that's symptoms, and then we need to check it out, and we should do a test and do an exam,” says Dr. Corry Clinton, Family Medicine, Lima Memorial Health System.
If blood tests suggest cancer could be present, a biopsy is performed to determine the Gleason score, which measures how aggressive the cancer is by analyzing the types of tissue present.
“The most common type you see in the samples is a five. Well, then that's the first part of the Gleason score, and then you get the second most common tissue type that you see. And if you see the second most common tissue type is, say grade two, then you got a score of seven. Everybody's heard from President Biden's Gleason score being a nine, and that's most common is five, and then the second most common is grade four, and that, unfortunately, is a pretty developed cancer,” adds Dr. Clinton.
According to the American Cancer Society, approximately 313,000 men in the United States are expected to be diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2025.
