The man who wants to live forever may have hit a speed bump.
A fan of telling all about his longevity journey, biohacker Bryan Johnson recently shared on social media that he has an incurable autoimmune disease where his “stomach is eating itself.”
And true to his biohacking ways, the 48-year-old wrote that he would “try and solve [the condition],” which he says only 2 to 5% of people have.
While his current health routine involves optimizing everything from sleep to fertility, this wasn’t always the case, as Johnson shared he regularly ate fast food and sugary beverages as a kid.
Then, after years of struggling with stress, weight gain and chronic depression, his body began developing an autoimmune process that affected his thyroid and stomach lining — autoimmune gastritis (AIG.)
And the outlook is grim, with the tech mogul writing that “standard medical care concedes defeat, stating that nothing can be done except managing the condition.”
Johnson was unaware he’d been dealing with the condition, despite it causing what he says is irreversible damage to the body, including nutritional deficiency, anemia and increased cancer risk.
After being diagnosed with hypothyroidism, or an underactive thyroid that fails to produce enough hormones, at 21, Johnson supplemented with levothyroxine and Armour Thyroid to ensure his thyroid functioned properly.
However, despite not noticing any symptoms, Johnson believes there were early signs of AIG; in hindsight, he just hadn’t connected the dots, noting low ferritin (a protein that stores iron) without anemia.
Johnson’s not alone, as those with AIG typically don’t show notable symptoms, which can include abdominal pain, iron deficiency, loss of appetite, nausea or unexplained weight loss.
Despite taking an iron supplement, Johnson’s ferritin levels remained below normal, prompting a series of medical tests to determine the cause and explain why his “iron kept disappearing.”
A clean colonoscopy ruled out colon cancer, so his medical team moved on to a bi-directional endoscopy to look at the entire intestinal tract, along with blood biomarkers.
The blood results showed elevated levels of anti-parietal-cells-antibodies, which pointed towards AIG, as the condition occurs when antibodies attack healthy stomach cells, often in those with a family history or another autoimmune disease like autoimmune thyroid disease.
But the final piece of the puzzle was stomach biopsies that showed early weakening of the stomach lining — clear early signs of autoimmune gastritis.
Johnson further explained that each of his issues — the iron deficiency, his autoimmune thyroid disease and the AIG driving the low iron — were linked and made each one difficult to fix.
He noted that “iron and thyroid feed each other both ways, low iron impairs the conversion of thyroid hormone into its active form and an underactive thyroid impairs how the body uses iron.”
While autoimmune gastritis cannot be cured, it can be managed via B12 injections or iron infusions, the latter of which Johnson received a “1,000 mg Monoferric iron infusion.”
But that won’t stop him from trying to solve the condition, with a plan to routinely monitor several diagnostics, including ferritin and iron, B12 and chromogranin A. Gastrin.
Additionally, his team will perform repeat biopsies and develop experimental intervention treatments depending on the results.
