The former president’s diagnosis raises awareness of the most common cancer among U.S. men

With Joe Biden’s recent diagnosis of an aggressive form of prostate cancer, the former U.S. president joins a growing group of people newly coping with the disease.

Biden, 82, represents one of more than 300,000 new cases of prostate cancer estimated to occur in the United States in 2025. And the incidence of this disease, the most common cancer in males, is rising. From 2017 to 2021, the incidence of prostate cancer increased about 3 percent per year, researchers reported in the Annual Report to the Nation on the Status of Cancer released April 21.

The disease’s death rate, however, has been riding a slow decline of about 0.6 percent per year from 2012 to 2022, scientists found. In 2025, some 35,000 people in the United States will die from the disease, the American Cancer Society estimates.

Overall, survival rates for localized prostate cancer are among the highest for all cancers. Men with early forms of the disease are more than 99 percent as likely as men without the disease to live for at least five years after their diagnosis. With late-stage cancers like Biden’s, where the cancer has spread from its original site to distant parts of the body, that number drops to 37 percent.