'Never diagnosed with cancer before last week': Biden's office rebuts Trump's 'cover-up' charge

Joe Biden's team said on Tuesday the former US president "had never been diagnosed" with prostate cancer before last week.

Biden previously had a blood test for prostate cancer 11 years, the spokesperson added.

"Prior to Friday, President Biden had never been diagnosed with prostate cancer. His last known PSA (prostate-specific antigen) test was in 2014," the spokesperson said in a statement to AFP.

At the time, he was serving his second consecutive term as the vice president under Barack Obama.

The statement from Biden's team came after his successor, US President Donald Trump, fuelled claims of a "cover-up" by the Democrat, saying he was "surprised" the public was not told about the cancer earlier.

Last Sunday, the 82-year-old's office announced he had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of prostate cancer, a few days after a nodule was found on the gland.

Prostate cancer, the most common among men, can be caught in its early stages using blood tests which measure for a protein called prostate-specific antigen.

Trump and his allies have now raised questions about when Biden and his doctors knew about the cancer, given its advanced nature and the intensive medical scrutiny of US presidents.

However, annual PSA screening after the age of 70 is not universally recommended.

The US Preventive Services Task Force advises against it, reasoning that the risk of false positives and the harms from biopsies and treatment outweigh the benefits.

Biden would have been aged between 71 and 72 at the age of the 2014 test.

Questions over his health dogged him throughout his curtailed re-election campaign last year, and have been renewed in recent weeks ahead of the release of a book detailing what it calls his "declining physical condition."

The former commander-in-chief expressed gratitude on Monday for an outpouring of "love and support" following his cancer diagnosis.