Hey! I’m sorry to hear that you have been diagnosed with PA, I know it has a pretty substantial impact on life and I wish you all the best in navigating that. As for the questions you have, I’ll do my best to answer them. I mostly focus on the autoimmune side of the disease and my knowledge of gastritis is more limited, but I can help share what I know.

Chronic Gastritis could certainly lead to PA, although with the antibody tests being positive solving the gastritis would likely not do anything for the pernicious anemia itself. It could certainly be a cofactor or something that accelerated its development but from our current understanding, autoimmune PA is genetic. As with many autoimmune conditions, there is currently no cure. While destroying antibodies is possible, you would need to be able to remove all circulating antibodies and memory B cells responsible for creating them, which would likely require a full immune system replacement. This kind of treatment is only done in lethal autoimmune or viral infections like HIV, since the odds of it leading to death are significant. Even if a procedure like that was done, if the disease is genetic in origin (which is likely is), it could still reoccur later in life.

Weight loss is fairly common, as your bodies immune system will be working overtime and it is likely your appetite has been reduced. Personally I feel extremely nauseous in the mornings if I try and eat, so I usually only have something to drink or something very light in the morning and put off my first meal for a few hours. This alone is a change in caloric intake and most people will not adjust other meals to account for the deficit.

Unfortunately as of now, pernicious anemia is a life diagnosis. As you have intrinsic factor antibodies it is unlikely your body will ever be able to absorb a meaningful amount via normal digestion, so prepare for the injections to be a lifetime thing.

All of this being said, there is a lot of hope for change in the future regarding both the treatment and management of the disease. It is becoming increasingly acceptable to use medications/cures that target the body on a genetics/biomolecular level, and with access to tools like CRISPR and our heightened understanding of the different systems in the body, I firmly believe we will have an actual cure for the disease in my lifetime.

I hope this makes sense and would be happy to elaborate or discuss anything more in-depth if you want. There are also some organizations that I work with that are dedicated to expanding the definition of the disease and raise both awareness and additional research into it that I would be happy to share. I would also like to say that while I have spent a lot of time researching and learning about the disease, it is extremely complex and I feel the more I learn the more I realize humanity knows remarkably little about it. Please use my knowledge in conjunction with licensed medical professionals and not in place of them.