First lady Melania Trump is expected to remain at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for the rest of the week. | Win McNamee/Getty Images White House: Melania Trump hospitalized for kidney condition

First lady Melania Trump underwent treatment Monday for a kidney condition and is expected to remain at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for the rest of the week, the White House said in a statement.

The White House said Trump, 48, went through an embolization procedure for a "benign" condition and had no complications. "The First Lady looks forward to a full recovery so she can continue her work on behalf of children everywhere," the statement said.


President Donald Trump tweeted Monday afternoon that he was headed to Walter Reed to visit his wife. “Successful procedure, she is in good spirits,” he wrote. “Thank you to all of the well-wishers!”

Trump’s communications director, Stephanie Grisham, declined to comment further.

"The likely things that would cause someone her age to have the need to have something embolized is likely a benign condition called an angiomyolipoma — that's a benign tumor, it's not a cancer, of the kidney,” said Mark Schoenberg, a urologist at Montefiore Medical Center in New York. “You wouldn't do this procedure to someone who has cancer.”

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Schoenberg added that the lengthy hospital stay seemed normal. “Probably what they're trying to do is make sure — anytime you monkey around with kidney, bleeding [can] become significant quickly,” he said. “They're being appropriately cautious.”

The Mayo Clinic describes an embolization as a treatment in which a thin tube is used to inject an agent that reduces blood flow to an area of the body — to kill off a growth, for example, or stop a hemorrhage.

Ladan Golestaneh, a nephrologist at Montefiore and associate professor in the Department of Medicine at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, said this type of embolization is a relatively complicated procedure targeted at plugging a bleeding blood vessel — “like plugging a leak.”

But the procedure most commonly follows another surgery, Golestaneh said, as it’s “very rare” for bleeding to start spontaneously.

It is not clear what Melania Trump did for Mother’s Day on Sunday. The president went golfing in Sterling Virginia, according to pool reports, but she was not seen there. In a Twitter video message commemorating the day, the president did not mention her.

One of Melania Trump’s predecessors, former first lady Rosalynn Carter, underwent surgery to remove scar tissue from her small intestine in February.

In the past, Melania Trump and the president have visited injured soldiers at Walter Reed. Her surgery was announced just a day after the Pentagon said three American detainees recently released from North Korea had left the facility to return to their families.

Annie Karni and Dan Goldberg contributed to this report.

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