[Photo: Dr. Bornstein with wife Melissa, from Facebook]

President Trump takes medication for 3 ailments, including a prostate-related drug to promote hair growth, Dr. Harold 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.

Dr. Bornstein, Trump’s longtime physician, who spoke by telephone in four interviews over the past month, also said that Mr. Trump takes a daily baby aspirin to reduce the risk of a heart attack. Over all, he pronounced Mr. Trump healthy and his medical care “as exactly up to date.”

Dr. Bornstein granted the interviews after The New York Times asked him to discuss his role in Mr. 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, Mr. Trump is the oldest person to become president.

The disclosure that Mr. 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 Mr. Trump has a very low level of prostate specific antigen, or PSA, a marker for prostate cancer. Mr. Trump takes a small dose of the drug, finasteride, which lowers PSA levels. Finasteride is marketed as Propecia to treat male-pattern baldness.

Dr. Bornstein said he also took finasteride and credited it for helping maintain his own shoulder-length hair and Mr. Trump’s hair. “He has all his hair,” Dr. Bornstein said. “I have all my hair.”

Dr. 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 Mr. Trump’s personal physician since 1980. He said that he had had no contact with Mr. Trump since he became president, and that no one from Mr. 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.

Dr. Bornstein said that Mr. Trump had gone to his East Side office for annual checkups, colonoscopies, and other routine tests every year since 1980. Before that, Mr. Trump was a patient of Dr. Bornstein’s father, Dr. Jacob Bornstein.

EARLIER MEDICAL REPORTS RELEASED BY DR. BORNSTEIN.  In December 2015, Bornstein released a hyperbolic 4-paragraph letter about Mr. Trump’s health that included, the following:

“If elected, Mr. Trump, I can state unequivocally, will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency,” Dr. Bornstein wrote. He offered scant medical evidence for his prediction beyond saying Mr. Trump had no significant illness and nothing that required treatment outside of his office.

 

Eight months later, Dr. Bornstein stirred controversy by saying he wrote the letter in 5 minutes while a limousine sent by Mr. Trump waited outside.

A 2nd 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 Mr. 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.

Dr. 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.