On trail, few mentions about McCain’s health

But because such a test cannot be definitive, the surgeons, with McCain’s advance permission, removed the surrounding lymph nodes and part of the parotid gland, which produces saliva, in the same operation, which lasted five and a half hours.

The final pathology analysis showed no evidence of spread of the melanoma, his staff said at the time. McCain, of Arizona, has said he did not need chemotherapy or radiation.

In 1999, during McCain’s first race for president, he gave the public an extraordinary look at his medical history — 1,500 pages of medical and psychiatric records that were amassed as part of a United States Navy project to gauge the health of former prisoners of war. This reporter, who is a physician, interviewed the senator’s doctors in 1999 with his permission.

But this time around, McCain has yet to make his full medical records or his physicians available to reporters. At least three times since March 2007, campaign officials have told The New York Times that they would provide the detailed information about his current state of health, but they have not done so. The campaign now says it expects to release the information in April. The melanoma removed in 2000 was Stage IIa on a standard classification that makes Stage IV the most serious. For Stage IIa melanoma, the survival rate 10 years after diagnosis is about 65 per cent. But the outlook is much better for patients like McCain, who have already survived more than seven years.

No spread has been detected in the three or four dermatologic checkups McCain has undergone each year since 2000, stress tests show no evidence of heart disease, and “his doctors consider him in very good health,” his campaign staff said.