You may never have heard of glycans, but you’ve probably observed their effects. Most notably, they’re involved in your immune system’s inflammatory response. Now, as you might know, inflammation can be an important part of fighting off injury and disease, but too much of it causes long-term health problems. If you can measure your glycans, perhaps you can track the ongoing impact of aging on your immune system.
Glycans can be found on most cells. They’re a type of protein with a range of different roles, and like many parts of the body, they’re essential to your overall wellbeing. Also like many parts of the body, when they go wrong, they can cause all sorts of issues. Their role in your immune response means this can affect the progression of pretty much any disease.
Changes in your glycans happen throughout your life due to a mix of genetics and lifestyle factors (epigenetics, to use its fancy name). Your diet, exercise levels, hormones and surrounding environment can all aggravate inflammation. This inflammation may be relatively mild, but it’s also ongoing. Chronic inflammation can lead to you aging faster, which in turn leads to more inflammation. It’s a nasty cycle.
Scientists have become particularly interested in glycans recently because it appears they can allow covid-type viruses to enter the cells. That may be a contributing factor in how older people are more at risk from covid. Imbalanced glycans form part of the wider aging and weakening of the immune system.
If glycans can be used to track the aging of the immune system and indeed biological aging more generally, there’s an obvious benefit to being able to measure and analyze them ourselves. That’s what some researchers think, as they try to develop glycan testing (https://longevity.technology/lifestyle/glycanage-testing-your-glycans-to-improve-immune-health/). This isn’t just about curing disease after it happens but spotting the risk far in advance and stopping it before it can get going.
The glycan testing kit currently being developed isn’t that complicated. It’s basically a blood test. You may even be able to do it at home, but you’ll have to send the sample to a lab where they can read it properly. By assessing your immune system and your current biological age, the experts may be able to warn you about any weaknesses and provide advice on how best to mitigate them.
