Brian Austin Green says he suffered 'stroke-like symptoms' for more than 4 years: 'I couldn't talk'

Brian Austin Green has revealed that he privately suffered from a mystery illness that gave him "stroke-like symptoms" for almost half a decade.

"I'd spent four and a half years recovering from stroke-like symptoms without ever having had a stroke," he said on a new episode of Cheryl Burke's Sex, Lies, and Spray Tans podcast. "I couldn't speak."

The 50-year-old 90210 alum said he spent three months bedridden after being originally diagnosed with ulcerative colitis and vertigo. However, he explained, his doctors still weren't sure what was causing his symptoms.

"Then these neurological things started happening after the vertigo, and that was — it was four and a half years of my life. I got to the point where I shuffled like I was a 90-year-old man," Green recalled. "I couldn't speak. I couldn't read. I couldn't write."

When Burke seemed to suggest that the illness was related to an 2014 car accident in which Green and ex-wife Megan Fox were hit by a drunk driver, the Special Forces: World's Toughest Test star dismissed the idea.

"No, it was dietary," he said. "It was all undiagnosed by Western medicine, so I ended up having to finally find a doctor that is much more into, like, kinesiology and Eastern medicine."

His new doctor later informed Green that he had "internal inflammation from gluten and dairy." Stress, he said, exacerbated the condition.

Still, his health continued to puzzle his other doctors. "I had a doctor at Cedars who is one of the top neurologists in the country and he would share everything that was going on with me with his colleagues and try and figure out what was going on," Green said. "I had done over 190 blood tests. I had two MRIs. And it got to the point where he was like, 'I don't know what to do. I don't know what's going on with you.'"

The condition gave the actor such bad "brain fog" that he once "reintroduced my best friend of like 25-plus years to my sister who he had also known for 25-plus years."

As part of his recovery process, Green said he would read Dr. Seuss books to his children "because they were so complex, verbally, to read," adding, "It was like gymnastics for my brain."

Green has since "fully recovered" from the illness and is now "100 percent" back to normal.

"Coming out of it, I was like mid-40s, so it's like, 'Okay, how much of it is age-related, like memory issues and things like that? And how much is possibly left over from [the illness]?'" he said. "I don't know if I'll ever completely know the answer to that, and I don't know if I'm supposed to. And that's totally okay."

Listen to Green talk about his illness in the podcast above.

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