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Scientists propose to assess the risk of early death of a person using retinal scanning
What’s going on
- A simple retinal scan can predict whether a person is at risk of early death — the greater the gap between a person’s chronological and biological ages, the greater the risk of death, according to a study by a group of Chinese and Australian scientists. The work was published in the British Journal of Ophthalmology.
- The study analyzed more than 130 retinal images of patients aged 40 to 69 years.
- The authors of the work propose to estimate the biological age of a person by scanning the retina of the eye – the method is based on machine learning to predict a person’s age by measuring the deterioration of tissues in the back of the eye.
- The algorithm was able to accurately predict the age of a healthy middle-aged person – the error was about three and a half years from a single image of the retina.
- At one time, a large gap between chronological age and retinal age became indicators of a high risk of early death – 49-67% higher than in people with a gap of 3,5 years. In addition, each year of difference between chronological and biological ages reflected a 2% increase in mortality.
- Scientists plan to conduct additional tests in different age groups to confirm the results of the study.
What does it mean
The biological age of a person is an indicator that reflects the degree of aging of the body, which depends on the person’s lifestyle, heredity and the state of the environment. In a healthy person, the age of the body, as a rule, coincides with the chronological one. Scientists offer a variety of biomarkers for determining biological age, from blood tests to measure the age of the immune system to tracking DNA mutations.
Why is biological age important? First of all, it allows you to assess the general state of human health. This indicator varies depending on a large number of factors, and monitoring it will tell you what is good and what is bad for the body. Experts recommend the following measures to slow biological aging: maintaining a healthy diet, healthy relationships, stress management, healthy sleep and physical activity.
The discovery of new biomarkers makes it easy to determine biological age. If the results of the presented work are confirmed in subsequent trials, this indicator can be measured using a mobile application, which will also allow doctors to remotely assess the condition of patients.