The health of President Trump and former President Biden has recently come under the spotlight, causing the public and medical experts to discuss how age-related health issues—from cognition to cancer to cardiovascular conditions—should be evaluated among our top elected officials. To get some insight on what White House medicine looks like, I interviewed former physician to the president, Jeffrey Kuhlman, in a recent episode of Science Quickly. In an edited excerpt of our conversation below, Kuhlman addresses age and politics.
Young: You brought up age. How much of the public’s concern around a political figure’s age is actually warranted from a medical perspective?
Kuhlman: I would state the obvious: age is the number-one risk factor for heart disease, it’s the number-one risk factor for cancer, and it’s the number-one risk factor for neurodegenerative conditions or cognitive decline.
I think that age is important. We have a gerontocracy. We have the oldest person ever elected to be president as the current president, and he’ll be 82 when he completes his second term. We have a senator who’s 91. New York Times invited me to write an essay about neurocognitive assessment. It is a fact of science, it’s not a political attack, that humans past the age of 60, [nearly] every single human starts to have cognitive decline.
The current president, who’s 79, he would benefit from a neurocognitive assessment. And that’s testing that does memory, reasoning, speed of processing, spatial visualization. So it just needs to be [a] more comprehensive assessment for these senior citizens that are in elected positions of great decision-making in the world.
Listen to the full interview with Jeffrey Kuhlman on Science Quickly, and wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Connect with me via email (lauren.young@sciam.com) or on Bluesky @laurenjyoung.bsky.social.
—Lauren Young
