President Donald Trump takes medication for three ailments, including a prostate-related drug to promote hair growth, Trump’s longtime physician, Dr. Harold N. Bornstein, said in a series of recent interviews.
The other drugs are antibiotics to control rosacea, a common skin problem, and a statin for elevated blood cholesterol and lipids.
Bornstein, who spoke by telephone in four interviews over the past month, also said that Trump takes a daily baby aspirin to reduce the risk of a heart attack. Overall, he pronounced Trump healthy and his medical care “as exactly up to date.”
Bornstein granted the interviews after The New York Times asked him to discuss his role in Trump’s care and to clarify and expand on earlier statements he made about his patient’s health during the presidential campaign. In recent decades, The Times has interviewed presidents, presidential candidates and their doctors about their health. At 70, Trump is the oldest person to become president.
Matthew Cavanaugh / Getty ImagesDonald Trump speaks to the media at Pease International Trade Port on April 27, 2011 in Portsmouth, New Hampshire
White House officials declined to comment Wednesday night on the information provided by Bornstein, and would not say whether he was still Trump’s physician.
The disclosure that Trump uses a prostate-related drug to maintain growth of his scalp hair, which has not been publicly known, appears to solve a riddle of why Trump has a very low level of prostate specific antigen, or PSA, a marker for prostate cancer. Trump takes a small dose of the drug, finasteride, which lowers PSA levels. Finasteride is marketed as Propecia to treat male-pattern baldness.
Bornstein said he also took finasteride and credited it for helping maintain his own shoulder-length hair and Trump’s hair. “He has all his hair,” Bornstein said. “I have all my hair.”
Bornstein, 69, has a private practice on the Upper East Side of New York, was educated at Tufts University for college and medical school, did his fellowship in gastroenterology at Yale, and was Trump’s personal physician since 1980. He said that he had had no contact with Trump since he became president, and that no one from Trump’s White House staff had asked for copies of the medical records that he has kept for the last 36 years, or called to discuss them.
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Bornstein said that Trump had gone to his East Side office for annual checkups, colonoscopies, and other routine tests every year since 1980. Before that, Trump was a patient of Bornstein’s father, Dr. Jacob Bornstein.
Bornstein’s first brush with the public was in December 2015, when he released a hyperbolic four-paragraph letter about Trump’s health.
“If elected, Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency,” Bornstein wrote. He offered scant medical evidence for his prediction beyond saying Trump had no significant illness and nothing that required treatment outside of his office. Eight months later, Bornstein stirred controversy by saying he wrote the letter in five minutes while a limousine sent by Trump waited outside.
A second letter in September 2016 was more sober, although it omitted a number of details that would be part of a customary summary of a patient’s health. The letter did say that Trump is 6-foot-3, weighs 236 pounds, has a normal blood pressure of 116/70 and takes a drug called rosuvastatin (marketed as Crestor) to lower cholesterol and other lipids.
Sony Pictures Entertainment via Associated PressDonald Trump and Dr. Oz discuss the presidential candidate's health
Bornstein did not say how high the lipids were before the statin therapy, but he reported that the levels were in the normal range in recent tests: cholesterol, 169; HDL cholesterol, 63; LDL cholesterol, 94; triglycerides, 61.
In both letters, Bornstein wrote that Trump’s PSA level was 0.15. The low number led urologists not connected with Trump to say that he must have been treated for an enlarged prostate or prostate cancer. But Bornstein said in the interviews that Trump had had neither ailment and that his PSA level is low because of Propecia.
In the interviews, Bornstein said he refilled Trump’s prescriptions for a long-acting tetracycline, a common antibiotic, to control rosacea. The skin ailment can cause easy blushing or flushing with visible blood vessels. It also can spread over the face, and sometimes the chest and back. In different forms it can resemble acne and cause bumps.
Bornstein also addressed questions about Trump’s recent description of himself as a “germophobe.” Bornstein said he had never discussed that phenomenon with Trump, but “we are very careful to keep the examining rooms spotlessly clean, which we do anyway.” He added, “He always stands there and changes the paper on the table himself” after an examination. “Other than that, nothing.”
Bornstein said that he was sure that Trump was up to date on an HIV test, which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that all adults get at least once. He said if he became the White House doctor he doubted that he would include in Trump’s annual checkup any psychometric tests as a base line for potential dementia. Trump’s father, Fred, suffered from Alzheimer’s disease in his 80s and a number of experts have urged that older political leaders undergo such tests.