Hunter Biden said in a BBC interview that aired Friday that his father’s prostate cancer has gotten worse. “The cancer has spread, metastasized into his bones and further,” he said. “It’s very painful and it’s very debilitating in many respects.”
It is the bluntest public account anyone in the family has given since Joe Biden announced the diagnosis. Hunter Biden grew emotional describing what the last several months have looked like up close. “It’s really sad to watch,” he said. “The only thing that I’d say about my dad, about his health right now, is I wish he would complain more, because it’s not good.”
Some context matters here, because a lot of people are reading Friday’s news as the first word that the cancer reached his bones. It was not. When Biden’s office announced the diagnosis in May 2025, less than four months after he left office, the statement said he had been seen for a prostate nodule after urinary symptoms and was diagnosed with prostate cancer carrying a Gleason score of 9, Grade Group 5, with metastasis to the bone. A Gleason 9 is the most aggressive grade there is, and bone involvement made it stage 4 from the day it was announced. The one piece of good news in that statement was that the cancer was hormone-sensitive, which meant it should respond to treatments that cut off the hormones the tumors need to grow.
What Hunter Biden described Friday is progression beyond that starting point.
The stretch in between has been relatively steady in public. Biden completed a round of radiation therapy in October 2025 and has continued hormone therapy. In a video released July 15, he said the treatments were going well. His last major public appearance was June 27, when he delivered a keynote at the Maryland Democratic Party Gala alongside Governor Wes Moore. Hunter said his father is still doing his thing and still taking speaking engagements.
Jill Biden spoke about it on a podcast earlier this month, and her framing lines up with her stepson’s even if the tone is gentler. She said he is doing okay, then added the part that does not go away. Because it metastasized to his bones, she said, he will forever live with cancer. She described the experience of caring for someone with advanced cancer as constant, daily and challenging, and said Biden is tested every three months.
For anyone trying to understand the medicine without a doctor in the room: metastatic prostate cancer is treatable but not curable. Oncologists manage it with hormone therapy, sometimes chemotherapy, targeted drugs, and medications that protect the bones from fractures and pain. The realistic goal is slowing it down and keeping quality of life intact, not eliminating it. Hormone-sensitive cancers also tend to become resistant over time, which is the standard course of the disease rather than a treatment failure. Hunter’s description of new spread and significant pain is consistent with that kind of shift, though neither he nor Biden’s office has said that directly.
Which is the one caution worth stating plainly. Hunter Biden is the only source for this progression. There has been no statement from Joe Biden’s office, no update from his physicians, and no clinical detail beyond what his son said in a television interview. That does not make it wrong. It does mean the specifics of where the cancer has spread and what stage the treatment is in are not publicly known.
Biden is 83 and was the oldest person to serve as president. His health was a live political argument through the end of his term and it has not stopped being one since. But the thing Hunter described Friday is not a political story. It is a man watching his father be in pain and wishing he would say so out loud.
Prostate cancer is one of the most common cancers among men and often produces no symptoms in its early stages, which is why screening conversations matter, particularly for men over 50 and for Black men and men with a family history, who face higher risk and are typically advised to start those conversations earlier. If you have been putting off that appointment, this is your reminder.
