BRYAN JOHNSON has gone to extreme lengths to bolster his longevity. He’s done everything from penile shockwave therapy to intense psychedelics to transfusions of his son’s blood plasma as part of his ongoing mission of achieving immortality. But that mission has hit a snag.
The 48-year-old has shared on social media that he has a rare, chronic inflammatory disease called autoimmune gastritis (AIG). He put it in simple terms: “My stomach is eating itself”.
Johnson told his followers that he believes he probably started developing the disease in his childhood and early adulthood, before he implemented his present, strict lifestyle. “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,” he said.
“Juggling that stress and grind, I let my health slip and gained 40lbs [18kg]. 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.”
Rupert Leong, a gastroenterologist specialising in inflammatory bowel diseases, told the AFR that there is no way of knowing what caused the disease, but that it was just as likely to be brought on by Johnson’s experimental health interventions as his lifestyle choices in childhood.
“He’s tried to spin this to his activities in childhood, but that’s because it can affect his brand,” said Leong. “What he has is actually a terrible condition – it’s incurable, it can lead to malabsorption of nutrients. In women, it can affect pregnancy. If the cells progress, they can turn into stomach cancer.”
Johnson said he was diagnosed with AIG in May, but doesn’t know how long he has had it for. Between 0.4-4.5 per cent of adults worldwide have the condition. Treatment focuses on relieving symptoms and managing the condition, as there is no cure at this stage.
He has vowed that he won’t take the diagnosis lying down, promising to share updates on his efforts to “try and solve” the condition. How will he go about that? It will be through, he says, a number of experimental techniques based on “investigational and preclinical evidence” such as “custom AI-designed antibodies, or synthetic proteins, that can specifically seek out and inactivate or destroy the rogue immune cells attacking my stomach lining.”
“Modern medicine has normalised too many conditions that erode our health, function, and comfort, shrinking the goal to monitoring and management while a cure is rarely even attempted,” Johnson said. “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.”
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