To some, longevity influencer Brian Johnson may seem like the poster child for health.
He claims to have spent millions of dollars tracking and optimizing almost every aspect of his biology in order to radically slow down—and even reverse, he claims—aging. He’s clearly in good shape, claims to sleep more than eight hours every night, and boasts a “fertile age” of being in his early twenties. Johnson is 48 years old.
But last week, Johnson revealed he has a chronic autoimmune disease called autoimmune gastritis. The disease causes “irreversible damage” to the stomach lining and often develops silently and asymptomatically over many years, he said. He was diagnosed in May, he wrote, after years of persistently low ferritin, a protein that stores iron inside cells, which his team struggled to explain.
News of his diagnosis comes amid a surge of interest in longevity medicine and treatments, a growing area of research that has attracted equal public fascination. But how does a person who strives to live forever and carefully monitors everything from sleep quality and sexual potency to heart function and organ health suddenly discover a chronic disease that has been slowly progressing over many years?
To medical experts and anti-aging researchers, the diagnosis isn’t particularly shocking. Autoimmune disorders are quite common even among apparently healthy and healthy people, says Dr. Gian Corrado, head team physician for Northeastern University’s athletics team.
Autoimmune diseases, so named because the immune system mistakenly attacks the body’s own healthy cells and tissues rather than “foreign invaders,” cover more than 100 known conditions and can affect many systems throughout the body, experts say.
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“The etiology of most autoimmune diseases is unknown, although we know that there are environmental and genetic factors that predict who will be more susceptible,” said Emeka Okeke, an immunologist and assistant professor of biology at Northeastern University.
Okeke said Johnson’s disease is not fatal, but it is incurable. It may also increase your long-term risk of developing stomach cancer.
While many such conditions are incurable, most can be controlled with selected treatments and lifestyle adjustments, he said. However, Corrado said that like “neurodegenerative, cardiovascular and metabolic” diseases, autoimmune diseases can significantly impact a person’s “longevity, health and quality of life.”
Autoimmune diseases can also occur “from scratch,” or without any known cause, Okeke said. Scientists also suspect that inherited genes and environmental factors, as well as potentially infections, may trigger the disease process, he said.
Dr. Gian Corrado, chief medical officer at Northeastern University, said autoimmune diseases are relatively common. Photo by Alice Stone/Northeastern University
These blind spots can leave patients desperate for answers. Many people with autoimmune symptoms spend years searching for explanations that primary care screening can’t always provide, Corrado said. That uncertainty has partly fueled interest in longevity medicine and intensive health monitoring, he said, even as it has created opportunities for pseudoscientific treatments to flourish.
“I think frustration with ‘autoimmune’ and ‘neurological’ drugs has led to some progress, but they also contribute to the despair of many patients,” Corrado said.
But it’s the patients whose symptoms defy easy explanation that help scientific progress fill in the gaps, Corrado said. Although Johnson’s critics have attacked some of his anti-aging protocols, Corrado said his larger project is valuable because it helps draw attention to scientific issues that have received too little attention and funding.
Advances in longevity science have coincided with the ongoing revolution in personalized health monitoring. Modern medicine has also made it possible to collect an unprecedented amount of data on each patient’s health through wearable devices, blood tests and advanced imaging techniques that provide a more detailed picture of a person’s health, experts say.
Johnson is in a unique position to use these ideas: He has spent years conducting what experts call an “N of 1 experiment,” or an ongoing clinical trial involving one person. Using his body as a laboratory for careful health monitoring and anti-aging interventions, Johnson attempted to determine the extent to which the aging process can be measured, managed and slowed down.
Never before have people been able to gather so much information about their bodies, but many diseases still elude detection until they cause harm, says Ram Hariharan, a professor of data science and director of programs in the College of Engineering at Northeastern’s Seattle campus. “Brian Johnson is perhaps the most measured man alive, and this condition was hidden from him for many years.”
According to the Global Autoimmune Institute, a Virginia-based nonprofit dedicated to researching and funding autoimmune diseases, autoimmune diseases typically develop and progress over years, sometimes decades, from “silent immune failures” to the onset of clinical symptoms.
Although scientists understand how autoimmune diseases damage the body by causing chronic inflammation, they are still trying to understand why this process begins in many patients, Okeke says.
Hariharan, who studies anti-aging research, says N-of-1 health tracking is still limited. Most biomarker “insights” simply point to the same levers, such as adequate sleep, exercise, diet, stress management and quitting smoking and alcohol, he said.
He said researchers and patients have learned how to collect data, but added that “we are not yet in a position to manage our own health.”
“In most cases, we can only respond when the disease appears,” Hariharan said. “These single-object experiments can teach you a lot, but they can’t warn you about something he’s never seen before.”
Tanner Stening is an assistant news editor at Northeastern Global News. Email him at t.stening@northeastern.edu. Follow him on X/Twitter @tstening90.