By Julie Wernau and Brianna Abbott
Luigi Mangione was preoccupied with a litany of health problems years before he disappeared.
Mangione posted on social media about back pain, sleeplessness and brain fog. He sought advice from people experiencing similar symptoms. In the years before he was charged this month with murder in the fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare Chief Executive Officer Brian Thompson , Mangione wrote about attempts to manage what ailed him through diet and exercise and expressed frustration with healthcare providers.
Mangione posted over the years on Reddit forums about Pokémon Go, the University of Pennsylvania and bioinformatics. In 2018, he posted on forums about irritable bowel syndrome and visual snow, a neurological disorder that causes people to see flickering dots or static. Those conditions don't have clear causes or uniform treatments.
Mangione's disappearance from social media, friends and family before his arrest has left detectives and amateur internet sleuths working to fill the gaps. One question is whether his health has any connection to Thompson's fatal shooting.
Serious mental illness often manifests itself in men during young adulthood. Many symptoms are vague and difficult to identify until a person's illness is clear. Agitation and lack of sleep can accompany a number of physical and mental-health conditions. Whether Mangione had any of these conditions isn't clear.
When Mangione was in college at Penn, he posted about trouble sleeping and brain fog, cognitive symptoms that include difficulty concentrating and mental exhaustion. The problems began in high school and worsened at Penn, he said . Mangione attributed his decline to a stretch of heavy drinking and little sleep during his fraternity's hell week.
"I simply wasn't able to recover from a week of disturbed sleep," he wrote. "It's absolutely brutal to have such a life-halting issue."
Brain fog has a range of causes including autoimmune conditions, cancer treatment, mental-health conditions, stress or lack of sleep. Mangione said he underwent several rounds of blood tests including for Lyme disease, of which brain fog is a symptom. He was treated for Lyme as an adolescent, but the later test results were negative, he said.
"The people around you probably won't understand your symptoms -- they certainly don't for me," he wrote in July 2018 on a Reddit forum about brain fog.
A few days later, he wrote that he had considered dropping out of college. He had made excuses to friends when his grades started "tanking" as he struggled to understand lectures or focus on books.
He said he experienced visual snow, a rare neurological disorder that affects vision. The cause isn't well understood. It can coincide with migraines, ringing in the ears or anxiety.
Mangione also posted about irritable bowel syndrome and said in September 2018 that Blue Cross Blue Shield covered his bowel-related test. Soon after, he stopped posting about the conditions.
The struggle Mangione depicted online didn't match his achievements. In 2020, he completed bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science after four years at Penn and was inducted into an academic-honor society. A friend from Penn said he didn't recall Mangione's mentioning back pain or brain fog. The friend lost touch with Mangione after college.
Mangione started a remote data-engineering job during the pandemic and joined a co-living community in Hawaii early in 2022. Around that time, he said a surfing injury aggravated his spondylolisthesis, a condition caused by a vertebra slipping out of place.
"From childhood until age 23, my back would always ache if I stood too long, but it wasn't too bad," he wrote in February on Reddit.
The injury worsened the pain and pinched his nerves . He said his right leg shut down for a week after he slipped on a piece of paper. His right toe went numb; the foot tingled. On his Goodreads account, he posted pages of handwritten notes about the book "Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance." By September 2022, he wrote, his calves were twitching almost constantly.
Mangione switched from weightlifting and martial arts to yoga and core exercises that strengthened his abdominal muscles. He asked another Reddit user about spinal-fusion surgery.
"I got caught in this loop for a year, all the while putting my life on hold in my 20s and damaging my nerves while I waffled with the decision, " he wrote in July 2023.
Chronic pain can affect sleep and stress, and is often connected to mental health. Pain can also fray a person's social connections, said Dr. Padma Gulur, a pain-medicine specialist at Duke Health.
"It can be very disruptive," she said.
Mangione underwent surgery that July, his posts show. Spinal-fusion surgery involves connecting vertebrae with screws and rods to stabilize the spine. It is usually offered after more-conservative efforts such as physical therapy don't work. The surgery is successful some 85% of the time, spine surgeons said.
"At day eight I was taking zero pain meds and haven't had a bad day since," Mangione said in October 2023.
He listed athletes and others who had successful surgeries. "Hope this can help others who find themselves in the same place!"
His later posts on Reddit and X tended toward advice about spondylolisthesis, traveling and modern civilization.
"We live in a capitalist society," Mangione wrote on Reddit in an April post suggesting that people tell doctors they are "unable to work" to get spine-surgery approval. "I've found that the medical industry responds to these key words far more urgently than you describing unbearable pain and how it's impacting your quality of life," he wrote.
--Joshua Chaffin contributed to this article.
Write to Julie Wernau at julie.wernau@wsj.com and Brianna Abbott at brianna.abbott@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
December 21, 2024 05:30 ET (10:30 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2024 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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