Biohacker Bryan Johnson, who says he spends US$2 million a year on his health, has revealed that he has an incurable disease and says his stomach is “eating itself.”
Johnson, a 48-year-old former tech CEO who rose to fame for his extreme health routine, shared the news in a social media post and said that he was diagnosed in May with autoimmune gastritis (AIG)
AIG results from antibodies attacking stomach cells and people with these conditions may not have symptoms, according to the Cleveland Clinic
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Two to five per cent of people have AIG but likely more, “because it hides,” who previously shared that he hopes to live until the year 2140, when he would be 160 years old
“As a kid, I ate sugar cereal, drank sugary soda, and gobbled down fast food. I had a few healthy years in my early 20s but then became a young father of three and began building a business,” Johnson wrote
“Juggling that stress and grind, I let my health slip and gained 40 lbs. Within a few years I’d fallen into a deep, chronic depression.”
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He said that somewhere in that timeline, his body began developing an autoimmune process that affects his thyroid and stomach lining
“My hypothyroidism got diagnosed when I was 21 years old with a routine blood draw. That enabled me to begin proactive management, supplementing levothyroxine and Armour Thyroid. They are the hormones my body should be producing on its own but wasn’t,” Johnson continued
“What I didn’t know was that something else was going on inside my body: my stomach had began attacking itself. But there was no routine test to find out and I didn’t have any symptoms,” he shared
After being diagnosed with AIG in May, Johnson began to question how long he had it
“AIG causes irreversible damage: nutritional deficiency, anemia, and over a long horizon, elevated cancer risk. When AIG is discovered today, standard medical care concedes defeat, stating that nothing can be done except managing the condition, no matter how awful or lethal the effects,” Johnson wrote
Johnson, who began his quest to extend human lifespan by undergoing blood plasma transfusion and injections of stem cells, said he “overhauled” his medical team earlier this year
“It was the rebuild to lay the groundwork for Immortals Care, our $1M a year protocol. With greater capacity, we revisited everything,” he added
The biohacker said that his team began “connecting the dots” and found out that his iron kept disappearing due to his stomach acid being disrupted
“Put against my 27+ year history of autoimmune thyroid disease, the pieces pointed to a single hypothesis: my own immune system was attacking my stomach,” Johnson wrote
After his medical team ordered five biopsies to be taken from three regions of his stomach, Johnson discovered the signs of early autoimmune gastritis
“We now had a formal diagnosis. I have autoimmune gastritis AIG. My stomach is eating itself. So this was never one problem. It was three, linked to one another: the iron deficiency, the autoimmune gastritis driving it, and the autoimmune thyroid disease alongside it,” he explained
Johnson claims that he and his team are going to “try and solve” his AIG, sharing his next steps for how they are approaching it
The first step involves routine monitoring to keep the disease in view. He also plans on “doing advanced characterization of the disease.”
“We’ll do a repeat biopsy to read the immune infiltrate, deep cytokine profiling, and T-cell subset analysis, to see which pathways are actually firing,” he wrote. “That testing drives the intervention plan, including the experimental approaches we intend to develop.”
Johnson said that there is no approved cure for AIG today and medicine treats it as “something to manage, not solve.”
“In the age of AI, multiomics, and custom-built DNA, proteins, and cells, no condition should be presumed incurable simply because no one has yet tried to cure it with today’s stack,” he added
