Cardiovascular Disease and Glycans: The Inflammation Marker Cardiologists Are Starting to Watch

Heart muscle inflammation is a natural immune response to an infection or injury to the heart, causing pain as well as redness and swelling of the heart tissue. It's a well-established, well-studied condition, and it's also, in a sense, the wrong place to start if the goal is preventing cardiovascular disease rather than reacting to it. By the time inflammation is acute enough to cause chest pain or an abnormal heartbeat, the underlying process has usually been building for years. This article looks at that earlier window: how chronic, low-grade inflammation drives cardiovascular risk long before any acute event, and how glycan biomarkers are giving both clinicians and health-conscious individuals a way to see it coming.

Chronic inflammation doesn't just raise cardiovascular risk in isolation — it's one of the central mechanisms behind biological aging itself. For a deeper look at that broader connection, read Chronic Inflammation & Inflammaging: The Hidden Driver of How You Age.

The future of preventative cardiology 

Assessing cardiovascular risk from chronic inflammation is challenging because the standard tools are built to catch damage after it happens, not the process leading up to it. Lipid panels and blood pressure readings capture traditional risk factors but miss inflammatory activity entirely. Imaging methods like coronary calcium scoring can detect existing plaque buildup, and CRP testing offers a general inflammation signal, but none of these show how the inflammatory process is unfolding at the molecular level, or whether it’s getting better or worse over time.

All of these tools share the same limitation: they're built to confirm damage that has already occurred, not to flag the trajectory leading up to it. Preventative cardiology is now moving in the opposite direction — toward molecular biomarkers that can be tracked over months and years, well before a cardiac event, rather than diagnostic tools that only become useful once symptoms appear. Glycans are one of the more promising candidates in that shift.

Glycans as a molecular clock for vascular health 

Glycans are complex sugar structures attached to proteins, including immunoglobulin G (IgG) antibodies. As the immune system becomes more pro-inflammatory with age, the glycans attached to IgG change in predictable, measurable ways — which is why they're sometimes described as a "glycan clock" for immune and vascular aging, distinct from clocks built on DNA methylation.

Prof. Gordan Lauc, Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer of GlycanAge, has described how early this signal appears:

"What we know by now is that in many inflammatory diseases, glycans — IgG glycans — change up to a decade before people get diagnosed with a disease."

— Prof. Gordan Lauc, Co-Founder and Chief Scientific Officer, GlycanAge; Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, University of Zagreb

That decade-long lead time is the core argument for using glycans as a trajectory marker rather than a diagnostic one: the molecular signal moves first, while there's still room to intervene.

How specific glycan structures signal cardiovascular risk 

The liver produces C-reactive protein (CRP) in response to inflammation, and high CRP levels in the blood can signal atherosclerosis and a greater risk of heart attack. But CRP only tells part of the story — it’s a general marker of inflammation, not a picture of what’s driving it at the molecular level.

Glycan biomarkers add a layer of resolution that CRP alone doesn't capture. As Prof. Samia Mora, Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and researcher in the Division of Preventive Medicine at Brigham and Women's Hospital, explains:

"Over the past almost two decades now, we've identified that inflammation is crucial for all aspects of atherosclerosis, which is the underlying biologic mechanism."
— Prof. Samia Mora, MD, MHS, Associate Professor of Medicine, Harvard Medical School; Division of Preventive Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital

A 2024 study published in Circulation Research examined IgG N-glycosylation profiles across two independent patient populations and found that specific glycan structures were associated with future cardiovascular events, independent of traditional risk factors such as cholesterol, blood pressure and smoking status. An agalactosylated glycan (missing a terminal sugar linked to pro-inflammatory activity) was positively associated with cardiovascular risk, while several digalactosylated and sialylated glycans (structures generally linked to anti-inflammatory antibody activity) were associated with lower risk. You can read the full case study breakdown here.

Clinical application: why standard tests can miss this 

One of the more clinically significant findings in this space is that inflammation and cholesterol don't always move together. Research from Prof. Mora's group has shown that a person can have an entirely normal cholesterol profile and still carry meaningfully elevated cardiovascular risk if their inflammatory markers are high, which is a blind spot for any workup built around lipid panels alone.

The same research group identified a glycan-based inflammatory signal that predicted future heart attack and stroke risk in a cohort of more than 27,000 initially healthy women followed for a median of 17 years, and found that this signal correlates only moderately with hs-CRP, meaning it captures cardiovascular risk information that standard inflammation panels don't fully account for.

For functional medicine practitioners, this is the practical case for adding glycan-based biomarkers to a cardiovascular workup: not as a replacement for CRP or lipid testing, but as an independent signal that catches risk a purely lipid- or single-marker-based panel can miss.

Monitoring your cardiovascular trajectory 

This is the role GlycanAge plays. Rather than waiting for symptoms or an acute event, the GlycanAge test tracks the same IgG glycosylation patterns linked to chronic inflammation and cardiovascular risk, translating them into a biological age score you can monitor over time. Two tests taken months apart can show whether a lifestyle change, a treatment plan, or a new intervention is actually shifting your underlying inflammatory trajectory, not just your symptoms.

Personalised plans are also available for those pursuing more advanced, performance-oriented longevity goals, and healthcare providers can integrate glycan testing directly into a broader cardiovascular risk assessment.

All packages come with affordable payment options, and a Result Interpretation Call can be booked separately with a qualified healthcare professional or scientist to help interpret your results and build a tailored plan to address chronic inflammation. 

Start tracking your cardiovascular trajectory with a GlycanAge test.

External sources

• https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4497511/ — Hohensinner PJ, Niessner A, Huber K, Weyand CM, Wojta J. Inflammation and cardiac outcome. Curr Opin Infect Dis. 2011;24(3):259-264. 

• https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33046850/ — Tschöpe C, Ammirati E, Bozkurt B, Caforio ALP, Cooper LT, Felix SB, et al. Myocarditis and inflammatory cardiomyopathy: current evidence and future directions. Nat Rev Cardiol. 2021;18(3):169-193. 

• https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9658900/ — Henein MY, Vancheri S, Longo G, Vancheri F. The role of inflammation in cardiovascular disease. Int J Mol Sci. 2022;23(21):12906. 

• https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3614623/ — Fairweather D. Regulating inflammation in the heart. Int J Biomed Sci. 2007;3(1):9-13. 

• https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3074795/ — Al-Hadi HA, Fox KA. Cardiac markers in the early diagnosis and management of patients with acute coronary syndrome. Sultan Qaboos Univ Med J. 2009;9(3):231-246. 

• https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4049143 — Krišić J, Vučković F, Menni C, Klarić L, Keser T, Bečeheli I, et al. Glycans are a novel biomarker of chronological and biological ages. J Gerontol A Biol Sci Med Sci. 2014;69(7):779-789. 

• https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4323825/ — Akinkuolie AO, Buring JE, Ridker PM, Mora S. A novel protein glycan biomarker and future cardiovascular disease events. J Am Heart Assoc. 2014;3(5):e001221.