An Incurable Disease Has Attacked Biohacker Bryan Johnson

Bryan Johnson, the tech entrepreneur turned longevity advocate who says he spends $2 million a year on his health, now says he has been diagnosed with an incurable autoimmune disease that causes his stomach to attack itself.

He disclosed in a social media post that he was diagnosed in May with autoimmune gastritis (AIG), a condition in which the immune system attacks cells in the stomach lining. The condition can lead to nutritional deficiencies, anemia and, over time, an increased risk of stomach cancer. According to the Cleveland Clinic, some people with AIG may have no symptoms.

Johnson, who has drawn global attention for an intensive anti-aging regimen aimed at extending his lifespan, said the diagnosis came after years of unexplained health issues.

“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.”

Johnson said he was diagnosed with hypothyroidism at age 21 after a routine blood test and has since managed the condition with hormone replacement therapy.

“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 wrote.

After receiving the AIG diagnosis in May, Johnson said he questioned how long he had been living with the disease.

“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 said he overhauled his medical team earlier this year as part of what he described as “Immortals Care,” his $1 million-a-year health protocol. The team reviewed his medical history after persistent iron deficiency raised concerns.

“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.

Doctors ordered five biopsies from three areas of his stomach, leading to the diagnosis.

“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 wrote.

Johnson said his team plans to closely monitor the disease, repeat biopsies and conduct immune system profiling in an effort to develop experimental treatments.

“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 acknowledged there is no approved cure for AIG.

“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 wrote.

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