By Adam Cancryn, CNN
(CNN) — New bruising on Donald Trump’s left hand is reviving questions about his health nearly one year after he became the oldest president to take the oath of office.
Across a series of events last week, the 79-year-old Trump appeared with discoloration or light bruising on the back of his left hand, in addition to the more persistent bruise on his right hand that has been visible for months.
The new bruise appears to complicate the White House’s explanation that the right-handed Trump developed the bruising through constant handshaking along with a regular regimen of aspirin that can make such discoloration more common.
And while medical experts told CNN there is no fresh cause for concern, calling it a likely benign condition common in older people, they warned that Trump’s reluctance to be more transparent about his health only threatens to intensify the scrutiny that he’s struggled all year to escape.
“They’re just feeding the curiosity cycle,” said Dr. Jeffrey Linder, chief of general internal medicine at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. “He’s in the public eye, he has a certain image he wants to portray, and even these minor things detract from that image.”
The fresh bruising on Trump’s left hand represents the latest development to fuel speculation about his health since he returned to the White House — a sensitive topic for him that he’s sought to counter by boasting frequently about his vigor.
Trump won last year in part by fanning voter concerns about former President Joe Biden’s age and mental and physical fitness for office. Trump has continued to use Biden, 83, as a rhetorical foil and rejected any comparisons with the former president despite their closeness in age, often disparaging his predecessor’s frailty and punctuating his own public events by asking, “Do you think Biden could do that?”
Yet while Trump has maintained a far more active public schedule, he’s nevertheless been hounded at times by his own set of health questions. After photos over the summer showed swelling in his legs, the White House announced in July that Trump had been diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency — a common condition frequently found in older people.
Asked this week about the bruising on Trump’s left hand, the White House declined to issue any new explanation.
“President Trump is a man of the people and he meets more Americans and shakes their hands on a daily basis than any other President in history,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt said.
Several medical experts who reviewed photos of Trump’s left hand told CNN that the discoloration wasn’t likely the result of handshaking — given Trump is right-handed — but that his age and aspirin regimen meant there could be some similar explanation.
“Bruising can be just simply a one-off thing when you have some trauma, you bump into something,” said Dr. Jonathan Reiner, a professor at George Washington University’s School of Medicine and Health Sciences, and who was a longtime cardiologist for former Vice President Dick Cheney. “Aspirin will make you more prone to bleeding.”
Reiner, who cautioned he has not personally examined Trump, added that he frequently sees similar bruising in patients who take stronger blood-thinner medications than aspirin, raising questions about whether Trump has disclosed all of the medicines he’s on.
Such medications are common and not an indication of any bigger health concern, he said, pointing to Biden’s disclosure of his use of the blood thinner Eliquis while in office.
“The question now is less medical t