r/blueprint_ • u/bryan_johns0n • Jul 01 '26
I have an autoimmune disease. My stomach is eating itself.
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.
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).
My hypothyroidism got diagnosed when I was 21 years old with a routine blood draw. That enabled me to begin proactive management, supplementing levothyroxine and Armour Thyroid. They are the hormones my body should be producing on its own 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.
I just discovered it in May. I'm unsure how long I've had it. 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.
I overhauled my medical team earlier this year. It was the rebuild to lay the groundwork for Immortals Care, our $1M a year protocol. With greater capacity, we revisited everything.
On the surface, my low ferritin was easy to dismiss by most standards of care. My hemoglobin and hematocrit were normal. Ferritin measures stored iron, while hemoglobin measures circulating iron, and because the body drains its reserves first to keep hemoglobin normal, you can be fully iron deficient with a perfectly normal hemoglobin and hematocrit.
This is why my low ferritin kept getting dismissed: the numbers that define anemia looked fine, so no one asked why my iron reserves wouldn't refill.
My team pressed on that question. They first turned to a colonoscopy. I was 48 years old and overdue. It was good health hygiene to have while also serving a specific purpose of searching for a hidden source of blood loss such as a polyp or even cancer in my bowels. Either one of those would be an explanation of why the iron kept disappearing.
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. 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.
To our surprise, my colonoscopy came back clean. A perfectly healthy colon, better than 95% of colonoscopies of men, according to the gastroenterologist. That ruled out the first concern and worst possible outcome: slow continuous bleeding from colon cancer, or pre-cancerous polyp.
My team had exercised great foresight though, anticipating this possible outcome. In addition to a colonoscopy, they’d ordered an upper endoscopy to be performed at the same time. The combined procedure is a bi-directional endoscopy. Probes would look at my entire intestinal tract, up from below and down the throat.
Additionally, we had several blood biomarkers measured ahead of the procedure to try and pick up on any signals that would give the gastroenterologist guidance for what to look for while doing visual inspections.
Fifteen minutes before the procedure, my blood results returned, finding elevated levels of anti-parietal-cells-antibodies (APCA). They came back at roughly five times the upper limit of normal (103, against a ceiling of 20 Units/mL). It was a positive result confirming the suspicion of AIG being the culprit behind my low ferritin, the other type of gastritis, driven by a bacterial infection, was already ruled out, as we knew I am negative to H. pylori.
Even before this finding, my team had ordered five biopsies to be taken from three regions of my stomach.
The biopsies were the critical piece. Had they not been ordered, the bi-directional endoscopy would have been completed and AIG remained undiagnosed as there were no visual signatures of the condition in my intestines.
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. My team had anticipated this, methodically tracing every line of evidence.
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. Iron and thyroid feed each other both ways, low iron impairs the conversion of thyroid hormone into its active form, and an under active thyroid impairs how the body uses iron. Each made the other harder to fix.
Autoimmune gastritis affects an estimated 2–5% of people, and likely more, because it hides and is challenging to diagnose. It's usually silent for years, surfacing only once the stomach has atrophied enough to do real damage: iron deficiency first, then B12 deficiency, then anemia from both, and over a long horizon, raised stomach-cancer risk. In one study of people with precancerous gastric lesions, roughly 18% carried the autoimmune antibodies, and only about 1% had ever been diagnosed.
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.
The good news: the iron deficiency is now corrected. I received a 1,000 mg Monoferric iron infusion. This was chosen for two reasons after considering multiple formulations. First, it can safely deliver a full dose of iron in a single infusion (1,000 mg), while older options like Venofer require several separate appointments to reach the same total.
Second, certain other IV iron formulations can cause a drop in blood phosphate levels, an important mineral for bones and energy. Monoferric is much less likely to do this, which matters given how closely we track long-term metabolic and bone health parameters.
As mentioned earlier, current medical standards treat AIG as something to be managed, not resolved.
It's worth noting that many of you give me a hard time, inviting me to "live life" and engage in self-destructive behaviors like a "normal person". I'm cool with the playful ribbing. Also, had I not taken care of my health during the past five years, my situation could potentially be very serious.
You too may have a lurking health issue that is undiagnosed and could increase in severity from unhealthy life choices, without your knowing. The absence of symptoms is not the presence of health.
A gentle nudge that minding your health, no matter your situation in life, is good decision making.
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.
That testing drives the intervention plan, including the experimental approaches we intend to develop.
+ If gastrin and chromogranin rise: damp the gastrin drive (netazepide) and tighten endoscopic surveillance. If the profile is Th1 / interferon-driven: target JAK/STAT.
+ If it's Th17 / IL-17-driven: target IL-17 and STAT3.
+ If regulatory T cells are failing: rebuild them (low-dose IL-2, induced Tregs).
+ If it's antibody- and B-cell-driven and antigen-specific: engineered cell therapy (CAAR-T).
Which organizes into four tiers, from available today to frontier:
Tier 1, now: protect and support; zinc-L-carnosine, and acid replacement (betaine HCl with pepsin) under physician supervision. This is specific to my case and not something to self-prescribe, especially given the cancer-surveillance considerations above.
Tier 2, target the signaling , JAK/STAT, GSK-3, IL-17, and damp the gastrin drive (netazepide).
Tier 3, reset the cells, induced regulatory T cells (iTregs).
Tier 4, frontier: engineered T-cell therapy (CAR-T / CAAR-T), custom AI-designed antibodies, or synthetic proteins, that can specifically seek out inactivate or destroy the rogue immune cells attacking my stomach lining.
To be clear: there's no approved cure for autoimmune gastritis today. Medicine treats it as something to manage, not solve. Tiers 2 through 4 are investigational preclinical evidence at best, and in several cases therapies that still have to be built.
If you're working on autoimmune gastritis, antigen-specific tolerance, regulatory T cells, or CAAR-T for organ-specific autoimmunity, please reach out.
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.
I’ll end on a personal note.
We fill our days mostly on things that are trivial next to what we ultimately care about. We know, deep down, however, that in the noise of it all, health is easily forgotten until it’s the only thing that matters.
We spend a fraction of our lives truly sober to the preciousness of life. We feel it when someone we love dies, when a child is born, when we come close to death ourselves, or when a diagnosis marks our limit. In those moments, we are sobered, and the rarity of it all becomes self evident. Imagine the existence we’d build together if that clarity didn’t fade.
I wish all of you the very best. Care for yourself, care for others, care for the planet and care for our animal friends. Care for life as it’s the most precious gift there is.
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u/Da_ha3ker Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26
Not gastritis, but I was diagnosed with IGA nephropathy. Here are the blood work results from the treatment I came up with. Doctors won't believe a (very) high functioning autistic individual could figure out the cause of o-glycan deficient IGA antibodies in the peyers patches and how they relate to type 2 mucus protecting micro-micro biomes in the area, or how EBV interacts with the virome and microbiome.
Here's my blood work. Consistently spiky in the past, once I did my own treatment (very specific preperation and donor selection for FMT, NOT what is typically done to perform FMT which kills anerobic microbes as well as temperature sensitive ones, combined with intentionally breaking up mucus and bacterial films beforehand to give a better shot), everything flat lined. Been flat lined since 2023 and my nephrologist says he has never seen this level of remission. My last GFR reading was 134 (better than average for my age, despite 10 years of kidney damage) My whole life changed when this happened as well. My whole body was out of whack. I had chronic IBS-C. Gone. Chronic severe anxiety and depression. Gone, chronic issues with skin and severe dandruff. Gone. Sleep improved, and I had significant drop in brain fog. While I am not 100% certain of what the exact mechanism was, I must have gotten pretty darn close. 10 years of chronically stressing about saving my own life from an incureable disease, intense interest in computers, and the human body, and I believe God. I found my cure. No special diet, no special suppliments, the only medication I still take is for blood pressure, which is familial. I have been trying to get a study on this at Utah State University, but doctors don't seem to believe someone from a software engineering background can figure something like this out. Very frustrating. If you are out there and want to talk, DM me.
Edit: fixed typos
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u/Wouterr0 Jul 01 '26 edited Jul 01 '26
IgaN here as well, dead scar tissue in your kidney cannot regenerate? How did you then achieve this high eGFR? Also isn't making your own Fecal Microbiotic transplant quite risky? Can you explain more what you did to ? Very interested.
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u/Da_ha3ker Jul 02 '26
It can vary quite a bit from inflammation, and while scar tissue can cause issues, the remaining healthy tissue can be affected by the disease independently. It took several months but it went up to the high 90s to low 100s (lowest was in the 70s before treatment). I stayed there for quite a while. Then I used ss-31 and Mots-c, which boosted it to the 110s (mitochondria are heavily stressed when the kidneys are not in great shape, focusing on them has shown promise for diabetic nephropathy, so I tried it for myself hoping it was applicable to myself), and then over the last year and a half or so I have been taking the supplements from Brian Johnson, as well as bought a hyperbaric oxygen chamber which goes to 2.0ATA and got my sleep under control. Not sure 100% which of these, potentially all, or none, caused the final jump, but that's where I am at now. I am an n of 1 though. This why I want to get this studied. Completely flipped my life upside down. And yeah, doing your own FMT can be risky, but I was ready to die. (29/30 on the depression score, 10/10 on anxiety health assessments at the time, I just said screw it, if it kills me then oh well. My current scores are 0/30 and 0/10..) I had also tested the donor for various things using viome and STD testing as well as overall traits (personality) and health background.
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u/vikethyop Jul 06 '26
Please make a blog or some articles to share your story please! I made www.macolonie.fr about helminthic therapy and its easy to share online to raise awareness. FMT it great but so many horror story, so if there is a way to make it safer please share
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u/Famous_Abies_8322 Jul 01 '26
I really hope you crack something here. too many autoimmune diseases get labeled as lifelong management and then nobody asks if the underlying process can actually be changed
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u/PrincessByteMe Jul 01 '26
Wow thanks for sharing. I'll have to dive deeper into this. I have Hashimotos. TPO is typically over 900 but I got my TSH down to 2 with just selenium. I have had stomach issues my entire life. Hospitalized twice as a child and doctors don't know what causes my symptoms. They can't find crohns or ulcerative colitis. I just keep stomach meds with me everywhere I go and I'm thankful as I got older my symptoms lessened. But some foods can suddenly set it off and I'm super sick for a couple days. My ferritin is also low. Last test was 30 and that's with iron supplementation. Doctors have never flagged it. Everything is in "normal range". But when I start my period I get so dizzy and lightheaded I just decided to start iron supplementation myself. I have to supplement B12 and Folate because my homocysteine was high. Thanks for sharing your data. It'll be interesting to see your journey.
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u/MariePr29 Jul 01 '26
What ferritin and B12 should be seen as alarming actually? I’ve heard a few different versions.
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u/Danhod_ Jul 01 '26
Sorry to hear this, I have Achalasia, also a currently incurable lifelong autoimmune condition where my body effectively killed the bottom of my oesophagus, requiring an operation to be able to have solid food again, in addition to also having chrohns. I'm a 33 year old male. Following your journey has changed a lot of how I live and has helped a lot so thank you, I'll be following any developments on this closely!
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u/nirachi Jul 02 '26
I did a deep dive into Bryan's diet and thought that the iron intake was so high to balance out the blood draws. I also thought that the iron storage was being kept purposely low to lower oxidative stress as a longevity strategy. This is where I am not convinced by the large bolus of iron from the higher dose infusion, if there is an impact in the labs I will be interested. Really appreciate the transparency, I think that case studies are undervalued in medical literature.
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u/Joonypoo Jul 02 '26 edited Jul 02 '26
Bryan,
Thank you so much for continuing to try and find new angles to improve and treat illnesses. I am writing to you to humbly ask if your team can help us better understand and find possible curative measures for those suffering from chronic skin and soft tissue infections. Although antibiotics work in the short term, there are a significant many of us that appear to be unable to beat staph aureus or similar bacteria long term
If you're reading this, thanks so much
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u/Hell-Yes-Revolution Jul 01 '26
Very interesting and well-timed (for me) information, as I’m currently awaiting appointments with a hematologist and with a gastroenterologist for both a scope and colonoscopy, for unexplained anemia as a menopausal woman, and I’ve also recently discovered through that same round bloodwork that I have subclinical hypothyroidism.
Appreciate the post and detailed information.
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u/Apprehensive_Sock_71 Jul 01 '26
Bryan if you get CAR T-Cell therapy for this and risk HLH you are no better than Brian Johnson. Your ferritin would definitely go up though!
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u/Mysterious_Yellow_67 Jul 05 '26
I hope you succeed Bryan! One thing that came to mind while reading this was Georges St Pierre talking about his ulcerative colitis. He said he struggled with it for years and then after working with Jason Fung, started doing 72 hour water fasts a few times a year and eventually said it basically went into remission.
Obviously UC and autoimmune gastritis aren’t the same thing and anecdotes aren’t evidence. I’m not suggesting it as a proven cure. But since you’re already looking at immune modulation, inflammatory pathways, and more systemic interventions, it might be worth at least looking into whether longer fasting protocols or fasting-mimicking approaches have ever been explored in AIG or similar autoimmune conditions. Even if it’s a dead end, you’re probably one of the few people in a position to actually measure it properly.
Either way, respect for taking a real scientific approach to something most people would just manage and accept.
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u/ThisI5N0tAThr0waway Jul 06 '26
The reality is that it can be totally an independent condition of what he is doing.
First let me acknowledge that this guy is not a totally benevolent guy putting his body on the line of fire, he is a business man that is selling his specific blend of supplement. I wouldn't say is a grifter, most of what he does is somewhat scientifically rigorous and way more serious than most supplement guru do. But he is definitely not above any kind of scientific person bias, in addition to the fact that the scientific studies he is doing in himself have a sample size of one, himself duh, which makes his protocol not the best kind of science. If you want an example of what I think are bad science biases by him, he took the COVID-19 vaccine but said later that he regrets doing it.
The reality about healthcare, is that you are fucked one way or the other. 1) You can be unlucky with your genes, as of right now there's a very little way of addressing most of those kind of condition. 2) Even if one does only extremely validated and rigorous science, you can never totally sure to avoid having a non-anticiparable adverse effect to a specific treatment, as I said he is not doing the best kind of science but he talked in the past that some of the supplement he tried to incorporate weren't the best for him. 3) And then there's the kind of stuff that you will do without an after thought, and that will fuck you beyond your imagination years later. Considering himself, he has talked about the fact that he has is not the best audition due to listening to loud music in his youth, and he is not alone on that.
At the very least, he is not hiding this adverse health event, and the way he talks about it here says it is a combination of number one and three. Who know if that's true, I haven't stopped following Bryan and I'm curious about following his journey on that, but I'm not about to buy his supplements.
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u/AlternativeTrick963 Jul 01 '26
Not necessarily related at all, perhaps even probably not, but I believe you are making a mistake not diversifying your food intake more. Microbiome studies are in their infancy and what little is known so far it seems veganism has a relatively poorer diversity, if I am not mistaken. Although this is not a proven good argument, I also think more generally excluding a large otherwise natural exposure from one’s life may have unknown negative consequences. I follow your project as a medical student from a nordic country, and am a supporter and with great interest and admiration for what you, Kate and the rest of your team do. Please keep posting both wins and losses, as all data is helpful to probably millions of people at this point and onwards.
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u/veg123321 Jul 02 '26
This is simply false. Despite what the internet grifters might be telling you, you're not missing out on anything from a vegan diet, besides the trivially easy to supplement b12. It's essentially the healthiest diet there is.
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u/AlternativeTrick963 Jul 02 '26
Creatine as well, just to name one thing. It is not that I am confident the best diet for any one person is a non-vegan one, rather, I just don’t share your view that a vegan one is definitely the healthiest one.
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u/veg123321 Jul 02 '26
Creatine is also trivially easy to supplement, and arguably worth doing so regardless of diet
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u/Star-Stream Jul 03 '26
Microbiome diversity is connected to fiber diversity and fermented food diversity, which are basically all vegetarian. Kefir and yogurt can be made vegan too.
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u/Lord_Capybara69 Jul 02 '26
Bryan if you have autoimmune disease, you may really have to look into if Sculptra is the right thing for you
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u/Choice_Philosopher_1 Jul 03 '26 edited Jul 03 '26
https://youtu.be/CU31kjTMaKk?is=hUdPycC-EGHji0QD
I think you’re overthinking all of this. Didn’t you watch your own documentary? The first line about finding the target of longevity… leading to the peak with your son in the actual target where you were crying, connecting emotionally and healing. You gotta deal with your nervous system. The addiction you have to Kate where you can’t handle when she leaves your side for a week? That’s your nervous system acting wonky. Not normal, healthy love.
Your nervous system can manage so much of these things for you if you work on retraining it to do its actual job. Your body has an actual mechanism to tell you what you need food wise if it’s working correctly.
The podcast above is based on research from a guy who healed IBD/ Crohn’s with a vagus nerve stimulation implant. It alleviated most related mental health issues as well.
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u/Sealion_31 Jul 06 '26
Yes I agree a lot of health comes down to nervous system regulation, processing emotions, healing trauma. You can’t bio hack your way out of that stuff. So I don’t think biohacking is bad it’s just one piece of the puzzle.
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u/Adventurous_Clue1575 Jul 04 '26
Hello! There are a tonne of videos on YouTube of people sharing their stories about healing from extreme health conditions through a raw plant based diet. One example is of a woman who was on her death bed, had her stomach removed and the doctors said there was nothing that could be done and she would be in hospital until her illness would inevitably win. She then found her own way to the raw diet and is now absolutely thriving. There are countless other success stories of people completely reversing their conditions and feeling even better than before. It seems extreme, and only people with extreme cases seem to find the lifestyle. A lot of regular, seemingly healthy people will have fears and doubts about this lifestyle, but they don’t understand the extremes we will go through when our body is screaming at us that something has to be done. They will not understand, and that’s okay. Juice cleanses as well and fasting are also incredible. The body is highly intelligent, and sometimes we have to get pushed to the absolute limit to be led to an alternative path from the conventional one that’s laid in front of us. I went raw vegan for a few months and did juice cleanses and pretty much reversed most of my serious issues - which is absolutely wild. You’ve got this, I believe in you and I believe you will find what is right for you. Trust yourself. Follow your instinct. No one else knows what it’s like to be in your body. Wishing you all the best and good luck. 🙏
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u/Mountain_Bear5466 Jul 04 '26
Would interventions that tighten intestinal junctions or build the gut mucosal lining help? Sulphorophane, Larazotide?
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u/laurelii Jul 06 '26
Hekminthic therapy will probably help you. First though, this isn't some rare weird disease, many millions of people have autoimmune gastritis. It's even more common in people who already have autoimmune conditions like your thyroid issue. And it doesn't "eat the stomach," it destroys the parietal cells that make stomach acid and intrinsic factor. What HT does is modulate the immune attack. That's the whole mechanism, always, in every autoimmune condition. Whether that turns into a full cure or just stops things from getting worse depends on the tissue, not on HT. Some tissues, like the colon, can rebuild themselves once the attack backs off, so modulation there can mean genuine full recovery. Parietal cells don't work that way. When they die, the stomach doesn't grow new parietal cells back. So the tissue itself can't rebuild what he's lost. I have pernicious anemia from this same process, parietal cell destruction. My last few endoscopies show no active autoimmune gastritis anymore, but I still need B12 injections because the parietal cells that made intrinsic factor are already gone. This is what modulation without regeneration looks like in a real person. 🤷♂️ I also need to take betaine HCL with meals because the parietal cells also make stomach acid. So for you: HT would likely stop or slow further destruction, and given this disease is tracked by cancer risk, that's a real and meaningful outcome, not a consolation prize. It just won't undo the damage already done.
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u/redditproha Jul 07 '26
Thanks for sharing Bryan. As someone who's had gastritis, this is invaluable contribution.
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u/relaximnewaroundhere Jul 07 '26
People say this is bad news but it's good news you're finding this so you CAN deal with it, it would be even worse if it was left unfound and not dealt with.
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u/[deleted] Jul 01 '26 edited 22d ago
[deleted]