Something in Your Eyes May Reveal if You're at Risk of Early Death, Study Shows

A quick and pain-free eyeball Scan could one day help doctors identify fast agers who are at greater risk of early death.

Even though getting older has an impact on everyone's body, it doesn't mean they are declining at the same rate.

It is possible to measure a person's true biological age by looking into their eyes.

A machine learning model can be used to predict a person's years of life by looking at their eye's tissue.

The age of nearly 47,000 middle-aged and elderly adults in the United Kingdom could be predicted by the algorithm within 3.5 years.
Over a decade after these retinas were scanned, 1,871 people have died, and those with older-looking retinas are more likely to fall in this group.

The risk of death from any cause in the next 11 years went up by 2% if a person's retina was a year older than their actual age. Their risk of death from a cause other than cardiovascular disease or cancer went up by 3 percent.

We don't know what is driving this relationship at a biological level because the findings are observational.

The results show that the retina is sensitive to aging. This visible tissue hosts both blood vessels and nerves, so it can tell us a lot about an individual's brain health.

The cells at the back of the human eye have been shown to help predict cardiovascular disease and other signs of aging. Theretinal age gap is a strong predictor of mortality as a whole.
The authors say that the link between eye and brain may support the idea that the retina is the "window" of neurological diseases.

The authors were not able to link dementia to the health of the eye because only 20 people died from it.
They point out that cardiovascular-related deaths have gone down in recent years as medicine continues to prevent fatal events.
Despite the fact that it was not linked to cardiovascular mortality, this means that it is still an important lens into cardiovascular health.

Photographs of the retina can help predict cardiovascular risk factors.

The authors conclude that the body of work supports the hypothesis that the retina plays an important role in the aging process and is sensitive to the cumulative damages of aging which increase the mortality risk.

The transcriptome aging clock and the DNA methylation clock are not as accurate as the age gap appears to be. These methods can be time consuming and costly.

The retina can be scanned in less than 5 minutes. If we are able to learn more about how this layer of tissue is connected to the rest of the body, clinicians could have an excellent new tool on their hands.

The study was published in a journal.