If you’ve ever heard people say that “your eyes are the windows to your soul” and brushed them off as hopeless poetics, then you might want to get back to them and apologize; scientists recently reported in a study published in the British Journal of Ophthalmology that there may be some credence to the old saying.
To be specific, they reported on the relationship between your chronological age and your so-called “retinal age,” and how that relates to your risk of an untimely death. The difference between the two, deemed the “retinal age gap” by the research team, may apparently be used as a screening tool to find out how great your risk of early death is.
With the help of machine learning, researchers were able to skip the invasive and privacy issues that entail the usual list of tests that can be done to track the usual biological indicators. Instead of peering into your body, the team instead resorted to performing a simple eye scan.
To do so, they gathered some 80,000 images of the fundus, or the back surface of the eye, taken from some 46,000 UK Biobank members aged between 40 and 69 years old. They then selected some 19,00 images taken from individuals who were in good health and used them to validate the accuracy of the deep learning model, according to a press release by the British Medical Journal.
The results revealed that participants whose retinal age gaps were greater than three (3) years had between 49-67% greater risk of death compared to those with smaller retinal age gaps. Additionally, every year difference in age between the eye and the body, the team found a 2% increase in “all-cause mortality,” with an added 3% chance for deaths from causes other than cancers and cardiovascular diseases, according to New Atlas.
According to the researchers in their written study: “Our novel findings have determined that the retinal age gap is an independent predictor of increased mortality risk, especially of non-[cardiovascular disease]/non-cancer mortality. These findings suggest that retinal age may be a clinically significant biomarker of aging.”
They continued: “Given the rising burden of non-communicable diseases and population aging globally, the early identification and delivery of personalized healthcare might have tremendous public health benefits […] Further, the recent development of smartphone-based retinal cameras, together with the integration of deep learning algorithms, may in the future provide point-of-care assessments of aging and improve accessibility to tailored risk assessments.”
(For more eye news, read further about an all-new “bionic” eye that’s now taking aim at human trials; after that, read about a brain transplant that managed to restore some vision for a woman.)
References
- Cassella, C. (2022, January 19). Something in your eyes may reveal if you’re at risk of early death, study shows. ScienceAlert. https://www.sciencealert.com/looking-deep-into-your-eyes-could-reveal-whether-you-re-a-fast-ager
- Difference between retina’s biological age and person’s real age linked to heightened death risk. (2022, January 18). British Medical Journal. https://www.bmj.com/company/newsroom/difference-between-retinas-biological-age-and-persons-real-age-linked-to-heightened-death-risk/
- Haridy, R. (2022, January 20). A simple retina scan could predict your risk of early death. New Atlas. https://newatlas.com/medical/retina-scan-could-predict-risk-early-death/
- Zhu, Z., Shi, D., Guankai, P., Tan, Z., Shang, X., Hu, W., Liao, H., Zhang, X., Huang, Y., Yu, H., Meng, W., Wang, W., Ge, Z., Yang, X., & He, M. (2022). Retinal age gap as a predictive biomarker for mortality risk. British Journal of Ophthalmology. https://doi.org/10.1136/bjophthalmol-2021-319807
