Global AGE Science Network
An education campaign on advanced glycation end products, the compounds that build up when sugars bind to proteins, and on what they mean for people living with diabetes and heart disease.
Most people have never heard of advanced glycation end products. Almost everyone carries them.
An AGE forms when a sugar molecule attaches to a protein or a fat without an enzyme steering the reaction. The chemistry is slow and it is cumulative: AGEs collect in tissue across a lifetime, and they collect faster when blood glucose runs high or when food is cooked at high dry heat. Once formed, most of them do not come apart.
What they do next is the part that matters clinically. AGEs stiffen collagen in blood vessels and skin, and they signal through a cell-surface receptor called RAGE that switches on inflammation. That pathway sits underneath a great deal of what makes diabetes dangerous over time: kidney disease, retinopathy, nerve damage, and cardiovascular injury.
Very little of this reaches the people living with it. Patients are told to watch their glucose, rarely told what sustained high glucose is chemically doing to their tissue, and almost never told that cooking method changes their intake. The Global AGE Science Network exists to close that gap.
AGEs and diabetes, with the Blue Circle Diabetes Foundation.
Blue Circle Diabetes Foundation hosted this session as part of their #BlueCircleWorkshops series, broadcast live and kept online afterwards. FutureVitals joined the conversation. It covers what AGEs are, how they accumulate, and which everyday choices change how quickly that happens.
The organizations working on this with us.
Diabetes and heart health organizations across four continents, each reaching a population that AGE research rarely speaks to directly.
Remaining partner organizations still to be named. Eight are listed here, so no total count is claimed on the page yet.
Turning a research pathway into something a patient can use.
Live workshops
Sessions hosted with partner organizations and broadcast to their own communities, so the audience is already the one that needs the material.
Plain-language explainers
The glycation pathway written for patients and students rather than for a journal, covering formation, accumulation, and the RAGE response.
Dietary AGE guidance
How preparation method changes AGE load, which is one of the few levers a person actually controls day to day.
Student research
FutureVitals students work through the AGE and RAGE literature directly, which is where the explainer material comes from.
Bring the initiative to your organization
If you run a diabetes, cardiovascular, or public health organization and want a session for your community, or you are a student who wants to work on the research behind it, we would like to hear from you.