A simple retinal scan will predict the risk of early death

We’ve all heard that “age is just a number.” Some people really look younger or older than their biological age. There has long been a hypothesis that determining the exact physiological age of an organism can give an understanding of the risk of many of its diseases. But to do this, you need to find an effective method to track the aging of the body. The last and simplest method is based on scanning the retina of the eye using machine learning technologies that determine the age of the body through the fixation of changes in visual tissues.

In most healthy middle-aged people, the algorithm accurately determines the age with an accuracy of 3.5 years based on a single retinal scan. But more interestingly, people with a large gap between biological and “optical” age had a higher risk of death during 11 years of follow-up. Statistically, a difference of more than 3 years increases the probability of early death by 49-67%. For each additional year of separation, the risk increases by 2% from general causes and by 3% from other causes besides cardiovascular diseases and cancer.

Studies show that the state of our retina is a kind of litmus test for detecting pathological processes of the cardiovascular system and neurological diseases, so its condition can be an important biomarker of aging. Now additional work is required on wider samples of subjects. But scientists believe that eye scanning can be used in express monitoring of the general condition of the body. The same algorithm can be integrated into a mobile application, which will allow doctors to remotely assess the health of patients.