Researchers have studied the eyes of nearly 47,000 people using Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques and concluded that the state of a person’s retina may signal a heightened risk of death, ScienceAlert reported.
Doctors may be able to identify the ‘fast agers’ one day by using a painless scan of the eyeball.
Aging affects everyone’s body differently, so just because two people have the same number of years under their belt does not mean they are physically declining at the same rate.
An in-depth look at the eyes of a person could provide a much better insight into the person’s true biological age, and this could help predict the health of patients in the future.
“The retina offers a unique, accessible ‘window’ to evaluate underlying pathological processes of systemic vascular and neurological diseases that are associated with increased risks of mortality,” says corresponding author Dr. Mingguang He from the Centre for Eye Research Australia in a media release.
The retina, which is the tissue in the back of the eye, can now be used to predict years of life based on a machine learning model.
Within a bracket of 3.5 years, the algorithm could accurately predict the age of nearly 47,000 middle-aged and elderly adults in the United Kingdom.
Within a decade of these retinas being scanned, 1,871 individuals had died, and those with older-looking retinas had a greater risk of dying sooner.
According to one algorithm, if one’s retina was predicted to be a year older than one’s actual age, the risk of dying from any cause rose by 2% over the next 11 years. At the same time, their risk of death from a cause other than cardiovascular disease or cancer went up by 3%.
Nevertheless, the results confirm a growing body of evidence that the retina is highly sensitive to aging-related damage. Due to the fact that this visible tissue contains both blood vessels and nerves, it could provide valuable insight into a person’s overall brain and vascular health.
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