Research

Hormonal

Age-related changes in IgG glycosylation, specifically the decrease in galactosylation, promote systemic inflammation (inflammaging), which actively contributes to the deterioration of the aging organism.

This research highlights that inflammation is a key driver of aging, linked to specific changes in your immune system's sugar coatings. While you cannot directly 'take' a glycan supplement, understanding that lifestyle factors (diet, stress, activity) influence these pathways suggests that maintaining a healthy lifestyle may help preserve beneficial glycosylation patterns, potentially slowing inflammatory aging.

ModerateSupportsMEDIUM confidence
Galactosylation strongly decreases proinflammatory function of IgG... thus, both age-related and individual variation in the decrease of IgG galactosylation with age is affecting inflammation and can actively contribute to the deterioration of an aging organism through the inflammation-based process named inflammaging.
Jasminka Krištić et al. · The Journals of Gerontology Series A · 2013

Why this rating

Strong observational data and mechanistic plausibility, but causal direction (glycans cause aging vs. aging causes glycan changes) is acknowledged as difficult to distinguish without longitudinal studies.

Source

Glycans Are a Novel Biomarker of Chronological and Biological Ages

Jasminka Krištić et al. · The Journals of Gerontology Series A · 2013

DOI 10.1093/gerona/glt190

cohort · n=5117Cited 414×
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DOI resolved against Crossref · corpus check 2026-06-10

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