HOW BRUCE WILLIS, 67, WILL END HIS LAST DAYS
Tragic movie hero’s brain damage may kill him in five years
TRAGIC Bruce Willis is suffering from an incurable brain-savaging disease that could be Alzheimer’s — and may be dead in just FIVE YEARS, predicts a top neurologist.
That’s the tragic truth behind the 67-year-old Die Hard hero’s Hollywood-rocking March 30 announcement that he’s battling aphasia — a condition that cripples speaking and understanding — and is forced to retire from acting.
Dr. Michael Tuchman, a lead researcher for a cure for minddestroying conditions like Alzheimer’s, says, “the aphasia is the symptom, not the cause, of the underlying disease!”
The doc, who has not treated the star, sadly adds the outlook for Willis “is not good” because his condition is likely incurable and predicts he has as little as five years left!
Tuchman says “the fact that he has been experiencing these symptoms for some time underlines that this is probably a degenerative or neurodegenerative process” — and not due to a stroke or a head injury, which “would have gotten better.”
The president and research director at the Palm Beach Neurological Center believes the likely causes of Willis’ condition are “frontotemporal lobar degeneration or Alzheimer’s.”
In either case, the disease “is progressive and we have no cure for it.”
He also predicts that Willis likely has five to ten years left to live, “especially if he’s had symptoms for many years, as has been reported.”
Meanwhile, the condition will worsen into a nightmare for the movie legend and his loved ones.
The father of three grown daughters with ex Demi Moore and girls Mabel, 10, and Evelyn, 7, with wife Emma, can expect to slide into a hellish dependence on family and caregivers as he loses his ability to communicate with others.
“It will get progressively harder for him to understand what people are saying to him or what is happening around him,” Tuchman says.
Eventually, patients lose the ability to do routine bodily functions like eating and bladder and bowel control.
“They typically die of complications from that — they are bedridden and die of urinary tract infections or pneumonia,” notes the doc.
As GLOBE has previously reported, evidence of Bruce’s mental decline has been mounting for years.
During a 2015 Broadway production of Misery, he needed his lines fed to him through an earpiece.
Around the same time, he seemed unfocused and slow to answer during a Today show appearance.
In February last year, the Sixth Sense star was booted from an L.A. Rite Aid drugstore for arguing with the manager about wearing a mandated mask.
Last summer, he reportedly forgot where he was during a film shoot and bizarrely began reciting lines from his old movies!
Sources say Bruce has already begun getting his financial affairs in order, selling almost $65 million in property over the last several years, including his luxurious $25 million Turks and Caicos estate.
“He’s going to become, over the next few years, increasingly dependent on family and caregivers for functions,” predicts Tuchman.
“It is not a disease that any of us want or wish our family members to have to live through.”