Unlocking The Glycan Code

Measuring Chronic Inflammation And Reversing Biological Ageing

At Biohacker Summit 2023 Amsterdam, held in Amsterdam, Netherlands, on 14 and 15 October 2023, Zorrie Dimitrova offered a brisk but provocative argument for a new frontier in longevity science: that the body’s hidden sugar structures, known as glycans, may reveal the earliest signals of chronic disease and provide a practical route to reversing biological ageing.

Dimitrova’s presentation, Unlocking The Glycan Code: Measuring Chronic Inflammation & Reversing Biological Ageing, took a subject usually confined to specialist laboratories and rendered it urgent, even intimate. Her central claim was clear. Long before disease arrives with a diagnosis, it may announce itself in shifting glycan patterns, subtle molecular signatures of inflammation, immune strain and accelerated ageing.

The Quiet Biology Behind Everyday Choices

She began with a disarming statistic: the average adult, she said, makes roughly 35,000 decisions a day. The point was not rhetorical flourish. It was the foundation of her case that daily habits, repeated almost invisibly, shape the internal chemistry of the body cell by cell.

“Every cell is a microcosm of life and energy, buzzing with activity, making decisions, and communicating with its neighbors,” Dimitrova said.

At the centre of that communication, she argued, sit glycans, complex sugar molecules that help regulate how cells interact and how proteins and lipids function. For decades, DNA and proteins have dominated public imagination. Glycans, by contrast, have remained obscure, partly because they are difficult and expensive to study. Yet in Dimitrova’s telling, they may be among the most revealing markers of health we possess.

Inflammaging And The Slow Fire Of Disease

The lecture turned on a distinction that modern medicine increasingly treats as crucial: the difference between acute inflammation and chronic low-grade inflammation. The former is protective, the body’s emergency response to injury or infection. The latter is quieter, more insidious and, over time, far more destructive.

Dimitrova described this state as “inflammaging”, the gradual accumulation of inflammatory burden as the immune system loses function with age. It is, she suggested, like an alarm that never fully switches off.

This persistent background inflammation has been linked to cardiovascular disease, diabetes and cancer, not as a dramatic event but as a long biological drift. In that framing, ageing is not merely the passing of years. It is, in part, the mounting cost of unresolved cellular stress.

Glycans As A Molecular Warning System

What made the talk stand out was not only its diagnosis of the problem but its insistence that the problem can be measured. Dimitrova said advanced glycan analysis now allows researchers to quantify chronic inflammation through a simple finger-prick test.

“Glycans tell you a story,” she said. “The long ones help us repair and rebuild, and this in turn reduces the inflammation in our body.”

Shorter glycan structures, by contrast, are associated with defensive immune activity, useful in fighting viruses, toxins and bacteria, but also more likely to leave inflammation behind. The balance between these states, she suggested, offers a biological narrative of whether the body is repairing, fighting or quietly deteriorating.

Perhaps the most arresting claim was that glycan patterns can shift up to a decade before clinical disease appears. Dimitrova said researchers had identified 72 diseases with unique glycan signatures, opening the possibility of intervention years before symptoms emerge. She also cited research from the University of Edinburgh that concluded glycans were the most predictive marker of future hospitalisation.

If true, the implications are profound. Prevention would no longer rely solely on broad risk categories or delayed diagnosis, but on personalised molecular evidence of what the body is already becoming.

No Standard Human

From there, Dimitrova moved to a critique of one-size-fits-all wellness culture. The modern market for health is crowded with universal prescriptions: keto, fasting, supplements, high-intensity training, sleep hacks. Her message was that much of this confidence is misplaced.

“There is no standard human, so what works well for one may not work for another,” she said. “There is no magic diet or exercise routine that works for us all.”

She referred to a diet study involving 1,850 participants across five dietary patterns, in which around half responded positively while the other half responded negatively to the same supposedly healthy interventions. Exercise, too, was framed not as an unqualified good but as a stressor that can become harmful when disconnected from adequate nutrition and recovery.

It was a useful corrective to the moral certainty that often infects the wellness industry. Health, in Dimitrova’s view, was not achieved by obedience to a trend but by discovering one’s own inflammatory triggers and responses.

The Promise Of Personalised Longevity

This is where glycan testing became, in her presentation, less a scientific curiosity than a behavioural tool. By measuring chronic inflammation over time, individuals could test whether a lifestyle change was genuinely helping or quietly harming them.

Dimitrova’s own case served as one example. Managing an underactive thyroid without medication, she said she reduced her biological age by removing gluten, sweets and alcohol, increasing plant diversity to at least 30 varieties a week, and shortening the daily fasting windows that had been suppressing her metabolism. When she drifted from that routine, she said, her biological age rose sharply within months, only to fall again when balance was restored.

Other case studies followed. A participant named Alex, she said, lowered his biological age by 13 years in six months by eliminating alcohol, improving sleep, adding strength training and adopting stress-management techniques. Dr Nick Engerer, already biologically younger than his chronological age, reportedly reduced his inflammation further and cut six more biological years in just three months by increasing the diversity of locally sourced organic plants in his diet while keeping everything else stable.

Then there was Anastasis Tsunis, a yoga teacher whose healthy habits had masked an elevated biological age. According to Dimitrova, shifting from a ketogenic diet to one richer in lean animal protein and low-glycaemic fruit, while reducing intermittent fasting and adding strength training, lowered his biological age by 17 years over three years.

Lifestyle As Preventive Medicine

For all the technical language, the moral of the session was strikingly plain. Much of chronic disease, Dimitrova argued, is not inevitable.

“Lifestyle is the most important element of healthy longevity,” she said. “If you implement healthy choices in your forties, you can gain up to thirteen years of healthy life.”

She also pointed to population data suggesting that up to 80% of heart disease, stroke and diabetes, and up to 40% of cancers, could be prevented through better lifestyle choices. It was an ambitious formulation, but in the context of the talk it was less a slogan than a challenge: if biology is responsive, then passivity is costly.

“Simple choices have a massive impact on our health outcomes,” she said. “Imagine preventing eighty percent of heart disease and forty percent of cancer just by being more conscious.”

A New Language Of Ageing

What Dimitrova offered at Biohacker Summit 2023 Amsterdam was not a miracle cure, nor even a single protocol, but a different way of reading the body. Ageing, in this account, is not only visible in the mirror or written in birthdays. It is encoded in molecular patterns that may be tracked, influenced and, to some extent, reversed.

That promise naturally invites scrutiny. The language of biological age can seduce precisely because it makes something abstract feel manageable. But the power of the talk lay in how it connected cutting-edge biomarker science to the oldest of public health truths: eat better, sleep properly, recover well, move intelligently, and reduce stress.

The novelty was in the feedback loop. Glycans, Dimitrova suggested, could show whether those familiar instructions were actually working for the individual living them.

By the end, her closing appeal landed with unusual force, not because it was grand, but because it returned the science to the scale of ordinary life. If trillions of cells are listening to every routine, indulgence and omission, then the body is keeping score long before medicine intervenes.

The question she left hanging was simple and difficult in equal measure: what, exactly, will we choose to change before the damage becomes visible?

Frequently asked questions

How many decisions shape our biology each day?

Zorrie Dimitrova opened with the claim that the average adult makes roughly 35,000 decisions a day, using it not as rhetorical flourish but as the foundation of her case that daily habits, repeated almost invisibly, shape internal chemistry cell by cell.

What is inflammaging?

Her term for the gradual accumulation of chronic low-grade inflammation, distinguished from acute inflammation, which is protective and short-lived. The chronic version is quieter, more insidious and over time far more destructive.

What can glycans reveal?

Dimitrova said advanced glycan analysis now allows chronic inflammation to be quantified through a simple finger-prick test. Glycans tell you a story, she said: the long ones help us repair and rebuild, and this in turn reduces the inflammation in our body.

About the event

This recap is part of the Biohacker Summit 2023 Amsterdam series, recorded in Amsterdam on 14 and 15 October 2023. Read the summary of the whole event or join the next edition, HOLOLIFE Summit 2026 Amsterdam, on 14 and 15 November 2026.