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Unlike Biden's situation, many forms of prostate cancer are slow moving. When you are diagnosed with most prostate cancers at an advanced age the saying is generally something along the lines of, "Something else will likely get you before the cancer does."Why? its treatable.
There is some concern in medicine that a diagnosis in those circumstances doesn't do much except to make a person's life miserable through aggressive treatments that have little payoff at best and at worst feel a little cruel when the patient goes through the hell of chemo and radiation treatment only to die of heart failure years before the cancer was going get him.
My dad was sort of on the early border of that. Diagnosed in his late 60s. Died a week from reaching 84. But it was the cancer that did get him in the end, and his treatments (although not particularly aggressive) probably got him an extra 5 or 6 years.