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APRIL 2025 TABLEHOPPING

HOW OLD ARE YOU ?

I get that question a lot from my wife. Usually it’s after I have done something she frowns on. Which is fairly often. But there is a place for this question in medicine as well. Your chronological age is easy…that’s the age on your driver’s license. Your biological age, what your cells tell us about your aging, is more important but harder to calculate. I have written previously about using different calculators to estimate your “true” age including the Levine Horvath Phenoage clock which I use in the office. There are epigenetic tests and telomere tests which can estimate your biological age but from personal experience I can tell you they vary a lot in a short period of time. Telomere age is a very accurate predictor of the health of a single cell but loses sensitivity and specificity when all the trillions of cells in the body are surveyed. You could send off blood samples at the chronological age of 50 and get results that vary by 10 years from samples taken the same day! Not so reliable. Not useful to assess whether the changes I am making in my lifestyle are making a difference in my “real” age.

But I am always looking to improve testing. Is there a better test for insulin sensitivity..Is there a better way to assess the health of the cell, the cell wall and cellular metabolism. Recently, I came across a podcast that presented a new way of looking at cellular aging. The test is called the glycan age. Glycans are sugar and protein compounds that attach themselves to circulating proteins in the body.

This company uses immune proteins that are already circulating…known as IG-G. This is a molecule that is directly involved in your immune system. There’s IG-G, IG-A, IG-M, IG-E and others. So this company uses the glycans that attach to the IG-G to assess how much inflammation the body perceives. Specific glycans are associated with specific degrees and types of inflammation. Using a tremendously large database the scientists at Glycanage.com have associated certain glycans with more or less inflammation and can translate that into numbers that reflect underlying inflammation and thus the “aging” of your body. The type of glycans attached to IgG are able to change the function of IgG from pro-inflammatory to anti-inflammatory and vice versa.

From their website “Glycans are directly involved in the pathophysiology of every major disease… Additional knowledge from glycoscience will be needed to realize the goals of personalized medicine and to take advantage of the substantial investments in human genome and proteome research and its impact on human health.”
– US National Academies, 2012

What I like about this test is that you can establish a baseline…Say you are 60 but your glycan age is 70..you can change your lifestyle and remeasure your glycan age to get an independent, scientific , reliable assessment of whether the changes you made actually improve your health. This is precisely why I like to measure your insulin and your omega 3/6 ratio over time. It’s not just how you feel, it’s what your body tells us about you. Of course, I want you to feel well but it’s critical that your body is functioning well and this gives us one more way to measure that. You don’t need to try to convince your doctor to order the test for you, it’s something …like the prodrome scan, that you can order for yourself and continue to take charge of your own health and health care.

Until next month…get well and stay well

JT BARRY MD