From Investing in GlycanAge to Becoming Its Case Study: Marko Mijatović's Biological Age Journey

Marko Mijatović went from water polo player to GlycanAge investor. Somewhere along the way, he stopped applying what he knew about health. When he tested his biological age, it came back 11 years higher than expected and kept rising. The doctors said there was nothing wrong. Then he found himself in an emergency room.

I know you've been close to GlycanAge as an investor, so you're familiar with the product from a business perspective. At what point did you decide to test the product yourself, and what were your expectations at the time?

Before moving into finance, I was actually an athlete. I played water polo professionally for more than 20 years. My educational background is in sports too: I did my bachelor's in physical education, so I am basically a PE teacher. I built on that with my master's in nutrition and dietetics. I think I only stopped playing professionally when I was 34. Up until then, I was all sports. So investing in longevity or preventive care companies is something I was passionate about both as an investor and on a personal note.

I always thought longevity is a very interesting vertical for investing, because I believe it's going to be one of the next booms. But as with everything in healthcare, the industry goes through cycles, and right now there is a lot of noise around it. Ice baths, various hypes. The pendulum tends to go too far before it finds credibility again, and a lot of it comes down to the fact that people start doing things without really measuring whether they work. For me, that's always been the one thing that stood out: you need to measure something before you can fix it.

You can get a number nowadays: my Oura ring gives me a number, my Apple Watch gives me a number, standard lab tests give you a number. But numbers on their own aren't very useful. They either make you feel good or bad and come with very generic recommendations, like "you should move more, you should lose weight." I already knew that. I didn't need a test for that. When you go to a cardiologist, you don't just get a number, you look at your LDL and lipoprotein B, and based on that, you modify something, whether it's medication, behavior, or any other intervention, and then you measure it again. I was looking for something that applies that same logic to overall health. I thought GlycanAge could be one of the answers, which is how I joined as an investor, and that's how I joined as a user.

From what I know, when you took your first GlycanAge test, it came back as 53 years old, which was around 11 years more than your chronological age. Given your background in nutrition and sports science, was that a surprise?

Well, the number was the last thing I cared about. Of course, my ego would have liked it to be much younger, but that's just on a very initial level. What I was actually most interested in was the post-test consultation with my GlycanAge specialist. I spoke with Bruno, and that's where I wanted to get to the bottom of what is working, what is not, what could be better.

Here is what the situation was at the time: I knew I was living a very unregulated life at the time. I was working a lot, I was struggling with sleep, and that's not something I needed a test to tell me. My sleep discipline is not very good. I probably have more stress than I should, and I don't get to move as much as I could outside of my workouts. Other than working out, which is probably five or six days a week, I'm living a very sedentary lifestyle. Through my discussion with Bruno, who was actually very helpful because he's an athlete himself, we discussed a few key learnings.

The first thing we looked at was my cardiovascular health. My LDL was relatively high, and we started seeing patterns around my cardiovascular health. I do have a history of cardiovascular illness in my family, and that's something I tend to track over the years. Some patterns stood out: my LDL was slightly elevated, and while my total cholesterol was fine, my heart rate variability (HRV) was very low. I also did some aerobic tests that came back quite low in terms of performance. So one of the learnings was: my cardiovascular health needs to be better. Coming from somebody who used to swim three to four hours a day and do a lot of cardio work, once I started talking to Bruno, I realized how much I had been neglecting that.

The next point was, of course, the sleep and overall activity. We also realized that my nervous system is probably way more primed than it should be. My sympathetic nervous system was much more dominant than my parasympathetic.

Your next GlycanAge test was just four months later, but your result went up to 60, making your biological age 18 years older than your chronological age. What do you think contributed to that jump?

Looking back, around the time of my first test in January last year, I had already started having what I was told were anxiety attacks. I kept believing it was not right. I had never had anxiety episodes before, but I also understand that it doesn't mean I can't develop them. They had started a few years earlier, just once or twice a year, but by that point they had increased to once every two months or so. I went to see my cardiologist and got a Holter monitor, the device you wear for 24 hours. It ended up coming back perfect. My LDL was slightly elevated, but nothing really bad. After seeing three different cardiologists who all told me I was fine and that it must have been mental, that it was anxiety, I accepted it and decided to work on that. And then I had a major episode.

It happened while I was driving to Montenegro, where I planned to spend my holidays. Long story short, I ended up in emergency care for the whole day because I had a cardiac episode. They brought me back to rhythm. It was actually a good thing that it happened close to a hospital, so they could observe it. What I had been told were anxiety attacks were actually atrial fibrillation. The whole thing started making sense. There was finally a physiological explanation to all the discussions I had initially with Bruno around my sympathetic stress and the things we couldn't necessarily pin down. My stress reaction to it happening was twofold: not only was I stressed about these episodes, which had started to affect my day-to-day life, but I was also stressed about seeing different doctors and everybody telling me there was nothing wrong.

So I flew back to Serbia, went to see my cardiologist and other doctors, and scheduled my surgery. By then, I was having episodes several times a week. I could clearly see the progression, and I thought it was going to be an interesting time to test. My second test was done in August, about a week before my surgery.

I'm wondering, how did the recovery post-surgery go, and how did it affect your GlycanAge?

The surgery was successful. The intervention is actually called ablation, where they go through your groin and all the way up to fix it. I was also lucky enough that with my work setup and a team to support me, I could take a couple of months and fully focus on my health, which is a privilege. I will always be grateful that my teammates allowed me to have that opportunity, because I don't know how many people have that. So I could focus on recovery, on getting my sleep in, on just being okay.

I took about a month off to recover and get back to normal. After that, I started working out again, but very gently at first, like a grandma walking, and then little by little incorporating more structured workouts. By my next test, my results improved dramatically. About five or six months after the second test, I improved by 15 years, and I'm now closer to my chronological age.

I'm less excited about the number itself. What clearly improved was my GlycanShield, basically my anti-inflammatory capacity, and my immune balance and GlycanAge Youth. These were the things most influenced by chronic stress, which turned out to be not just lifestyle-related, but also driven by arrhythmia.

I spoke to Paula [Head of Education at GlycanAge] and the team, and they actually found similar cases in their database. What they discovered is that the surgery itself doesn't have that much direct impact on glycans. The impact comes from the reduction in stress. It's not the heart condition per se, but everything around it: the lack of sleep, the worry about what is happening, what is going to happen, how the surgery is going to go.

Now that the main trigger has been removed, what lifestyle changes have you made since the surgery? Can you walk me through some of the actionable steps that have worked for you?

The heart condition and the surgery were by far the biggest factors.

The second one was working out, but that was actually the least of my concerns, because working out comes naturally to me. I've spent my whole life doing it. I mostly work out in the gym, usually four weight workouts and two cardio sessions a week, though in reality it's more often three or four. I realized, actually for the first time when discussing it with Bruno, that if you asked me I would tell you I do cardio twice or three times a week, but in reality that almost never happened. That's just the plan. So one thing that changed is being more consistent with cardio, and especially zone 2 cardio. I tend to stay in the 120 to 135 beats per minute range. Even though it is boring, it is also important for me, important for my LDL management, my aerobic capacity, my HRV, and so on.

On the daily movement side, it also helped that we moved to Dubai right after the surgery, since the weather is nice and you tend to be outside more. I started introducing small, simple things: instead of making coffee at home, I'd walk to a coffee place 500 meters away. Back and forth, that's already a kilometer. Little things like walking to a store that's a bit further than necessary. Before all this, my average step count was probably below 5,000 steps a day. Now I'm closer to around 8,000, but my goal is to get it over 10,000. I know these sound like small, silly things, but combined with my regular cardio, I think I can get my HRV back to where it needs to be.

As someone who also struggles with sleep, I'm very curious about your sleep journey. How has it been going, and what's your routine?

I've experimented a lot with it, because I've always struggled with sleep. The first thing I did was go for the easy fix: supplements. I tried a lot of things, and I'm still supplementing. Magnesium tends to work well for me and has no side effects, so I supplement with magnesium bisglycinate daily.

Overall, I found that supplements helped me fall asleep relatively easily, because I used to struggle both with falling asleep and staying asleep, and those are two different problems. With supplements, and basic things like not using my phone in bed, avoiding screens in general, being off my computer after 10 p.m., and reading books in the evening, I can fall asleep. However, it doesn't solve the issue of waking up in the middle of the night.

The thing that works best for me with staying asleep is actually morning discipline. How I start the day and how I spend the day affects how I sleep at night. I see a very clear correlation: if I go outside first thing in the morning, I sleep better that night. If I start my day immediately jumping on my computer, those are the nights I struggle with staying asleep. Getting morning sunlight, being active first thing, and when I say active, I just mean walking two blocks to get a coffee, not necessarily working out.

The last thing that really affects me is weekends. I have very disciplined weekdays, but then the weekend comes, and I'm somebody who is very social, very extroverted. I like going out on Friday and Saturday, which means I go to sleep at a completely different time, I wake up much later, and then I'm lazy in bed, scrolling on my phone without actually getting up. Then you expect Monday to be smooth. Of course it doesn't, and it takes me all the way to Wednesday to fix it.

If you're curious about why sleeping in on weekends might be doing more damage than you think, this article is worth a read.

Given your background in nutrition and athletics, you came to GlycanAge as an investor with some understanding of what it does. Has testing with GlycanAge changed how you think about longevity and preventive health?

It actually reinforced a belief I already had, but now I hold it much more strongly: the way we measure things and the way we look at them longitudinally over time is crucial. We just need to be much more individualized in our approach.

To do this, you first need a certain level of knowledge, and second, you need measurement. Companies like Oura or Apple Watch are a great start to get people thinking about taking care of their bodies. For me personally, the shift has been going from having no data to having a lot of it: my blood work, my various health markers, my GlycanAge results. The question now is, how do you put it all together?

That's what I think the next step is: integrating our nutrition, our behaviors, and our data into truly individualized, personal preventive care. We do have a lot of measurement techniques now, but the challenge now is to combine them into something comprehensive and actionable.

Finally, as someone who has experienced a higher result than expected, what would you say to others who find themselves in the same position?

It's an ego thing, right? Especially if you're taking care of your body and then somebody gives you a number that says you're really not doing that well. I assume it can easily lead people to think the test doesn't really work. In my case, my first result put me in my 50s. But I didn't feel like somebody in their 50s, and I also didn't look like somebody in their 50s. Gordon [CSO of GlycanAge] even said that data shows people who are really into their training and in great shape tend to very often score on the higher end.

So my suggestion is not to fixate on the number. It's the same as when you step on a scale: nobody cares what you weigh as an absolute number. What matters is how it changes over time. Same with biological age: I'm not going to walk around saying I'm 50 or I'm 40, so what? What matters is whether it's moving in the right direction. The number is a sexy metric because it's easy to interpret, but GlycanAge provides much more than that, and that's what you need to focus on.

Marko will be sharing his story in person at the Inflammaging in Clinical Practice event in Dubrovnik on June 20th, where he will join a panel discussion on patient case journeys across mental health, testosterone therapy, and cardiovascular intervention. If you'd like to learn how to measure immune aging to guide preventive and longevity care, you can find out more here.