299
Can you predict the exact length of your life? The answer, of course, is no, and if you think about it, it’s better: knowing the day your existence ends would be of some concern as the event approaches, even if, on the other hand, it enabled you to do anything you want before that specific date. Although it is impossible to pinpoint the moment with certainty, science has found a method that can give us an idea by studying our eyes.
The means that can indicate a person’s lifespan is the analysis of the difference between a person’s actual age and the biological age of the retina. This difference could aid in rough estimates of the years remaining. Indeed, science has shown that the small vessels in the retina can be reliable witnesses to our general health, especially with regard to the circulatory system and the brain. As the years go by, the risks of developing diseases increase, but the percentage of this danger varies from person to person of the same age.
Each of us has a subjective “biological aging” and this is what the researchers have focused on since it doesn’t go hand in hand with true aging, the one characterized by the number of candles on the cake. To identify the “age difference of the retina”, the team used deep learning to analyze the inside of the back surface of the eye of 46,969 adults aged between 40 and 69 in the UK. About 19,200 of the images of the back of the right eye of 11,052 healthy participants confirmed the effectiveness of this retinal age prediction system: in these cases a strong equivalence to actual age was found.
The gap was then evaluated on the rest of the sample, consisting of 35,917 people, with a follow-up of 11 years, during which 5% of the participants died due to the development of diseases and other conditions. Over the years, it has been shown that greater age differences in the retina are strongly associated with the risk of death, cardiovascular disease and cancer. Each year of difference corresponds to a risk increase of 2-3%. The same study method, applied to the left eye, yielded equivalent results.
“Our new results established that retinal age difference is an independent predictor of an increased risk of death. These findings suggest that retinal age may be a clinically significant biomarker of aging,” the researchers explained. “The retina provides a unique and accessible ‘window’ to assess the disease processes underlying systemic vascular and neurological disorders associated with risk of death.”
The observational study seems to confirm the results of previous research and thus supports the assumption that the retina plays an important role in the aging process and in lifespan itself.