The “Today” show’s longtime co-host and meteorologist Al Roker announced Friday he has been diagnosed with prostate cancer.
The 66-year-old NBC News star informed viewers that he’ll be taking some time off from the program while undergoing treatment.
“It’s a good news-bad news kind of thing. Good news is we caught it early. Not great news is that it’s a little aggressive, so I’m going to be taking some time off to take care of this,” Roker said.
Roker will undergo surgery at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.
“We’ll just wait and see, and hopefully in about two weeks, I’ll be back,” Roker said.
Dr. Vincent Laudone will be performing the surgery, and also joined “Today” to discuss what scans on Roker have discovered and the plan moving forward.
“Fortunately his cancer appears somewhat limited or confined to the prostate, but because it’s more aggressive, we wanted to treat it, and after discussion regarding all of the different options — surgery, radiation, focal therapy — we settled on removing the prostate,” Laudone said Friday morning.
Roker began his career at NBC in 1978.