It remains unclear whether doctors performed any mental acuity, cognitive or neurological tests during the president’s physical exam. Questions about his mental health intensified this month after the publication of a book in which his closest advisers are said to have questioned his mental abilities. That prompted Mr. Trump to insist that he is a “stable genius.”
It is also unclear whether Mr. Trump had tests common for men of his age, such as a treadmill stress test to detect heart problems.
In December 2015, as a presidential candidate, Mr. Trump posted on Twitter that his medical report would “show perfection.” About a week later, his personal physician released a four-paragraph letter saying that the candidate was in perfect health.
“If elected, Mr. Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency,” the physician, Dr. Harold N. Bornstein of Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan, concluded in the letter.
Dr. Bornstein wrote that a “complete medical examination” had indicated “only positive results,” though it gave few specifics and did not reveal Mr. Trump’s weight at the time. Dr. Bornstein claimed that his patient’s blood pressure and lab results were “astonishingly excellent.”
In an interview with The New York Times last year, Dr. Bornstein revealed that Mr. Trump takes a small dose of finasteride, a drug that is marketed as Propecia, to treat male-pattern baldness; the drug lowers levels of prostate-specific antigen, an enzyme made by the prostate. Dr. Jackson, the president’s current doctor, did not reveal whether Mr. Trump is continuing to take that medicine.
Annual medical exams for the president are a tradition that goes back decades.
In 1985, the doctors for President Ronald Reagan detected a cancer during what officials had described as a routine colonoscopy. The president had surgery that weekend and the cancer was removed, along with a section of his intestine. Doctors said at the time that the cancer did not require chemotherapy.
In 1990, doctors for President George Bush detected an early glaucoma in his left eye and prescribed eye drops. More than a decade later, in 2001, doctors for President Bill Clinton, concerned about an increase in his weight and elevated LDL cholesterol levels, started the president on statin drugs to treat those symptoms.
President George W. Bush was diagnosed in 2004 with a “low” to “very low” risk of coronary artery disease. Doctors recommended that Mr. Bush, then 58, take aspirin and a statin. In August 2013, when Mr. Bush was 67 and after he left office, doctors inserted a stent into one of his coronary arteries.
During checkups for President Barack Obama, his doctors expressed concern about the difficulty Mr. Obama had quitting smoking. But they never disclosed how often Mr. Obama smoked, making it impossible to calculate what doctors call pack-years, a measure of the risk of developing cancers from smoking.
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