Health6 min(s) read
Published 10:47 06 Jul 2026 GMT
Biohacker Bryan Johnson, who spends over $2 million a year to prevent aging, has revealed he is living with an incurable disease.
Johnson, 48, has made headlines in recent years with his quest to live forever, and the extreme lengths he goes to to prevent his body from aging.
The discovery that he has an incurable disease likely came as a bit of a blow, then - but Johnson has vowed to find a cure for himself against the odds.
Johnson told his followers on X (formerly Twitter): "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."
While Johnson has dedicated many years to becoming as healthy as he possibly can, he revealed that his younger years were very different.
He admitted: "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.
"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)."
He added that he was diagnosed with hypothyroidism at just 21 years old from a routine blood draw, and was then able to proactively manage the condition by supplementing the hormones his body should have been producing but wasn't.
"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," he revealed.
It would be over two decades until he got his AIG diagnosis, which was only discovered this May, and Johnson is unsure how long he has been living with the condition without having any obvious symptoms.
He shared: "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."
Johnson changed up his medical team earlier in the year to "lay the groundwork for Immortals Care, our $1M a year protocol", and "revisited everything" to try and discover the root cause, as he wasn't classed as anemic despite his low ferritin.
He underwent a colonoscopy as part of the diagnostics, which looked for a hidden cause of blood loss such as a polyp or bowel cancer, but this came back clear and showed a better result than "95% of men" his age.
"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," he added. "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."
He also underwent a bi-directional endoscopy, which looks at the entire intestinal tract, from above and below, as well as measuring several blood biomarkers, which showed elevated levels of anti-parietal-cells-antibodies (APCA), roughly five times the upper normal limit, confirming he was suffering from AIG.
Johnson also had five biopsies taken from three regions within his stomach which were critical to the diagnosis, as there were not visual signs of the condition in his intestines.
He added: "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."
Autoimmune gastritis affects around 2-5% of people - a number which Johnson believes is far lower than the real amount of people that likely have it, given how difficult it can be to diagnose, which also raises the risk of stomach cancer if left untreated.
He admitted: "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 on medication to regulate his iron levels, but wants to put more research into AIG, as it is currently seen as "something to be managed, not resolved."
Johnson 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."
He added: "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."
.webp_lli6Ty?tr=cr-74.9.445.380,f-webp,q-70,w-100)