What is GlycanAge?
The GlycanAge test is a biomarker test designed to measure biological age by analyzing the glycosylation patterns of Immunoglobulin G (IgG) proteins in your blood, which reflect chronic inflammation linked to your lifestyle.
The test involves a simple blood sample, which is analyzed in a laboratory to determine the glycan profiles. The results are presented as a GlycanAge score, reflecting the individual’s biological age. This score can be compared with the person’s chronological age to identify any discrepancies, indicating whether they are aging faster or slower than expected. The GlycanAge test is particularly useful for individuals seeking to monitor the effectiveness of lifestyle changes or treatments designed to slow down the aging process and enhance their quality of life.
What are Glycans?
Glycans are sugar molecules that modify proteins in your body, reflecting your lifestyle choices and indicating the inflammatory state of your immune system, which determines your biological age. They significantly influence your unique biology and are regulated by both your genes and your environment, including lifestyle choices.
Glycans are highly diverse and their structures can change due to various factors, including aging, disease, and lifestyle.
As biological age markers, glycans provide insights into the aging process because their patterns on proteins, particularly Immunoglobulin G (IgG), change predictably with age. By analyzing these glycan structures, scientists can assess the biological age of an individual, which may differ from their chronological age. This helps in understanding how lifestyle, diet, stress, and other factors influence aging and can guide personalized interventions to improve health and longevity.
How does the test work?
The GlycanAge test quickly responds to lifestyle changes like diet, exercise, sleep, and stress management. Regular testing helps you track how these choices affect your health. Aging is a natural process marked by accumulated damage from long-term immune system over-activation.
Discover your biological age to see if your lifestyle is optimal or identify areas for improvement. Order a test, receive your kit, and send back your sample using the provided postage. The finger prick test is quick and easy, with results taking 3-5 weeks for accurate measurement.
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Results
The GlycanAge test results provide a detailed analysis of your biological age based on the glycan patterns on your IgG proteins. Here’s what you’ll get:
- Biological Age Score: Reflects your biological age, which can be higher or lower than your chronological age.
- Glycan Profile: Details specific glycan structures on your IgG proteins.
- Comparative Analysis: Shows how your biological age compares to others in your demographic group.
- Lifestyle Impact: Insights into how diet, exercise, sleep, and stress affect your biological age.
- Recommendations: Personalized advice for lifestyle changes to improve your health and potentially lower your biological age.
- Consultation: Option for a free one-on-one video consultation with a specialist to interpret results and develop an improvement plan.
These results help you understand your aging process and make informed decisions to enhance your health and longevity.
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Frequently
Asked Questions
The accuracy of biological age tests is assessed in three key ways:
- Relevance for Long-Term Health Outcomes: Do the results predict future health conditions and hospitalization risks?
- Reliability: Are the results consistent with low repeat measurement error?
- Personalization: Are the results tailored to the individual based on age, gender, and ethnicity?
GlycanAge excels in all three areas. It is highly predictive of future health conditions and hospitalization risks, outperforming many other aging clocks and traditional clinical biomarkers. We prioritize quality and accuracy over profit, conducting multiple tests on each sample to ensure trustworthy results with an error margin of less than 1%. Any change in your GlycanAge score reflects a true biological change, not a measurement error.
Developed from over 30 years of research, GlycanAge is supported by 200+ peer-reviewed publications and a robust baseline of 200,000 samples from top biobanks, representing diverse ages, genders, and ethnicities.
While there are various methods to estimate your body age, true biological age is determined at a molecular level. This is where GlycanAge stands out among aging clocks. Unlike others, GlycanAge integrates genetic, epigenetic, and environmental factors, providing a comprehensive measure of the changes occurring in your body over time.
GlycanAge stands out among aging clocks by integrating genetic, epigenetic, and environmental aspects of aging, and it responds to lifestyle interventions. Unlike epigenetic clocks, which do not respond to caloric restriction or weight loss, GlycanAge does. Our studies show that beneficial lifestyle changes can measurably reverse glycan aging, making GlycanAge an ideal tool for assessing longevity interventions.
For instance, telomere shortening acts as a DNA timer limiting the lifespan of individual cells. While telomeres are excellent markers of aging at the cellular level, they are not reliable predictors of age-related health status for the whole body, which comprises trillions of cells with varying ages and lifespans. A large study recently concluded that telomeres are poor predictors of age-related health status.
Many epigenetic clocks have emerged based on Steve Horvath's discovery that certain DNA methylation patterns correlate strongly with chronological age. While epigenetics holds significant biomarker potential, there is limited research on what these clocks actually measure. The Horvath clock's strong correlation with chronological age limits its utility.
GlycanAge measures the composition of the IgG glycome (glycans attached to IgG). The IgG glycome not only changes with age but also affects inflammation at multiple levels. Glycans serve as both biomarkers and functional effectors of aging. Studies show that accelerated glycan aging is associated with unhealthy lifestyles and diseases, and in some cases, glycans are causal in disease development.
The GlycanAge test measures glycosylation patterns, specifically focusing on the glycan structures attached to Immunoglobulin G (IgG) proteins. This process is highly regulated and reflects changes due to aging, lifestyle, and overall health. The test provides insights into biological age by analyzing these glycan patterns, which can indicate chronic inflammation and the impact of various lifestyle factors.
What GlycanAge Measures:
- Glycosylation Patterns: The specific structures and variations of glycans attached to IgG proteins.
- Biological Age: An estimate of your biological age based on glycan profiles, which may differ from your chronological age.
- Inflammation Levels: Indicators of chronic inflammation linked to lifestyle and aging processes.
What GlycanAge Doesn't Measure:
- Glycation: The random attachment of glucose to proteins, which is a different, non-regulated process.
- DNA Methylation: Epigenetic changes in DNA that are used by other biological age tests.
- Telomere Length: The length of telomeres at the end of chromosomes, another biomarker of aging.
- Specific Diseases: While it can indicate general health and inflammation levels, it does not diagnose specific medical conditions.
In summary, the GlycanAge test is a tool for assessing biological age and the effects of lifestyle on aging, but it does not measure other aging biomarkers like glycation, DNA methylation, or telomere length.