For nominees, health details remain paltry

Neither candidate has updated health details since 2015.

Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have been more secretive and selective than many recent presidential nominees in providing up-todate details about their personal health — a particularly striking departure, experts say, given the candidates’ age.

No U.S. election has ever featured two major-party nominees as old as Trump, 70, and Clinton, 68, and they have kept a grueling pace for more than a year. Yet they have declined to share the latest information about their health or to make their doctors available for interviews. Each released a brief medical statement in 2015; neither has added to it since.

Trump has been especially unforthcoming, even as he has sought to turn health into an issue in the presidential race, questioning Clinton’s “physical and mental strength and stamina” as his allies push rumors that she is ill.

Clinton, appearing Monday night on Jimmy Kimmel’s TV talk show, called the rumors — propagated by Trump supporters including former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Fox News host Sean Hannity, as well as the National Enquirer tabloid, part of a “wacky strategy.”

“I have to step into the alternative reality and, you know, answer questions about, am I alive, how much longer will I be alive, and the like,” Clinton said.

Hope Hicks, a spokeswoman for Trump, said Monday that he would have “no problem releasing additional records” about his health if Clinton did the same. Advisers to Clinton, who has released more details than Trump, said the onus was on him to match her disclosures.

Republicans from Ronald Reagan to Mitt Romney have released details in the months before Election Day or directed their doctors to field questions. John McCain allowed some reporters to review more than 1,100 pages of his medical records.

Among Democratic nominees, Al Gore and John Kerry spoke openly about their health; Kerry had survived prostate cancer. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama were more reticent: Their aides argued that the two were young men with no health problems, though Clinton granted an interview on his health in 1996 under pressure from his Republican opponent, Bob Dole.

Trump, who regularly eats fast food and says he does not sleep much or take long vacations, has provided only a four-paragraph statement from his gastroenterologist last December. It contained no details about his heart rate, respiratory rate, cholesterol level, past medications or family medical history. It did include several laudatory declarations, describing Trump’s blood pressure (110/65) and laboratory test results as “astonishingly excellent.”

The doctor, Harold N. Bornstein of Manhattan, concluded that Trump, if victorious, “will be the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency” — a claim that was widely mocked as unprovable and unscientific.

Clinton issued a significantly more detailed twopage letter from her physician in July 2015 that included information about a concussion Clinton suffered in 2012, which left her with a blood clot in her head and double vision. Her doctor, Lisa Bardack of Mount Kisco, N.Y., said those symptoms were resolved within two months.