Bryan Johnson has spent years chasing one goal: slowing aging as much as scientifically possible. But despite investing more than $2 million a year into his health, the 48-year-old says he has now been diagnosed with an incurable autoimmune disease.
Johnson shared the news with followers on X, writing: “Bad news #1: I have an autoimmune disease. My stomach is eating itself.
“Bad news #2: 2–5% of people have this, too. Likely more, because it hides.
“Good news: I’m going to try and solve it. Will share all.”
The entrepreneur, who has become famous for his intensive anti-aging regimen, said he has been diagnosed with Autoimmune Gastritis (AIG), a condition in which the immune system attacks the stomach lining.
Despite the diagnosis, Johnson says he isn’t accepting that the disease can only be managed. Instead, he plans to invest heavily in finding a solution.
The condition went unnoticed for decades
Johnson explained that although he now prioritizes nearly every aspect of his health, his lifestyle looked very different when he was younger. He wrote: “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,” according to VT.
“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.
“Somewhere in that timeline, my body began developing an autoimmune process affecting my thyroid and then my stomach lining. It’s called Autoimmune Gastritis (AIG).”
Johnson said he was diagnosed with hypothyroidism at age 21 after routine blood work and was able to manage the condition with hormone replacement therapy. However, another autoimmune process had already begun without his knowledge.
“By taking these pills daily, my body was able to operate as though my thyroid was functioning properly. What I didn’t know was that something else was going on inside my body: my stomach had begun attacking itself. But there was no routine test to find out and I didn’t have any symptoms.”
It wasn’t until May this year that doctors finally diagnosed him with autoimmune gastritis.
“AIG causes irreversible damage”
Looking back, Johnson said there were warning signs that never led to an answer. He explained: “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.
“Looking back over the past few years, I can now see the early signals we were picking up in measurement but hadn’t connected the dots.
“For 11 years, I’ve had low ferritin, without anemia. We continually tried to raise my iron levels with food and supplementation but nothing would work.
“We chased the obvious solutions first. A plant-based diet means all my iron is the hard-to-absorb, non-heme kind. Hard training, sauna, and hyperbaric oxygen all raise the body’s demand for iron.
“But none of them explained the core failure: despite me taking iron orally, trialing every formulation, and using every timing trick, none of the iron would stick.
“What I didn’t fully appreciate until recently is how many stones my previous providers had left unturned. The low ferritin kept getting explained away but not fixed.”
Earlier this year, Johnson assembled a new medical team while developing what he called “Immortals Care,” his $1 million-per-year health protocol. The group revisited his medical history to determine why his iron stores remained low even though he wasn’t considered anemic. A colonoscopy ruled out hidden blood loss, including polyps and bowel cancer, and Johnson said the results were better than those of “95% of men” his age.
Doctors finally found the cause
His physicians then began investigating whether poor stomach acid production was preventing his body from absorbing iron. Johnson wrote: “At the same time, they began connecting the dots. Iron absorption depends on stomach acid, so one theory was that my stomach acid was disrupted.
“They also knew that thyroid and stomach autoimmunity often travel together, so often that the pairing has a name: thyrogastric syndrome.
“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.”
Further testing included a bi-directional endoscopy, blood work, and five stomach biopsies taken from three different areas. According to Johnson, blood tests found anti-parietal-cell antibodies (APCA) at roughly five times the normal upper limit, while the biopsies confirmed early autoimmune gastritis.
He shared: “Two days later, the results of biopsies came in, showing clear signs of early autoimmune gastritis: early atrophy confined to the acid-producing lining, with the rest of the stomach still spared.
“We now had a formal diagnosis. I have autoimmune gastritis AIG. My stomach is eating itself.”
Hoping to change how AIG is treated
Johnson said autoimmune gastritis affects an estimated 2% to 5% of people, though he believes the true number is likely higher because the disease is often difficult to detect. He also warned that untreated AIG can increase the risk of stomach cancer over time.
Johnson added: “And the earliest clue, low ferritin, is the one standard medicine waves through. Low iron stores get normalized and rarely investigated at all when anemia hasn’t shown up yet. That blind spot is what hid mine for a decade.”
He is now taking medication to manage his iron levels but says he wants to go beyond symptom management by studying the disease in greater depth. He explained: “My team and I are going to try and solve my AIG. This is how we’re approaching it:
“First, routine monitoring keeps the disease in view: ferritin and iron, B12, the pepsinogen I/II ratio, gastrin, and chromogranin A. Gastrin is the dial to watch. If it climbs, the disease is advancing, and the risk of gastric neuroendocrine tumors climbs with it.
“Second, we’re 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.”
Bryan Johnson has incurable stomach disease
Johnson also said that advances in medicine and artificial intelligence should make it possible to rethink diseases that have long been considered incurable.
“Modern medicine has normalized too many conditions that erode our health, function, and comfort, shrinking the goal to monitoring and management while a cure is rarely even attempted.
“Most of these verdicts were handed down decades ago, in an era that predates nearly all of our current tech and science, and they have gone largely unchallenged.
“We want to change that. 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.”
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