We all have five organs of sense, we use the eyes to see, the nose to smell, tongue to taste, the ears to see and the skin to feel. Out of the five senses, our eyes are the most important. In our daily interaction with the environment, 80% of what we perceive reaches our brains through the eyes.
Your eyes also say a lot about your health. By examining the eyes, your eye doctor can spot early signs of diabetes, high blood pressure, and even indications that you may have cancer, glaucoma as well as coronary heart disease. And there is more…
Research published in the British Journal of Ophthalmology, says the retina may also be able to provide us with an easy, noninvasive way to determine our body's true biological age, and this information may or may not mirror our chronological age.
The study which researchers say is the first of its kind, was published by Dr. Mingguang He, a professor of ophthalmic epidemiology in the University of Melbourne and Centre for Eye Research in Australia.
"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," wrote study author Dr. Mingguang He.
Using a form of machine learning called deep learning model, in the study, the researchers were able to estimate a "retinal age gap" between the actual biological health of the eye and the person's age since birth.
The study further found that there was a 2% increase in the risk of death from any cause for each year of difference between a person's actual age and the older biological age identified in the eye.
Where there were larger gaps of three, five and 10 years between the actual age and biological age measured from the retina, it was presumed that there were up to a 67% higher risk of death from specific diseases, even after accounting for other factors such as high blood pressure, weight and lifestyle differences such as smoking.
"Using a deep learning algorithm, the computer was able to determine the patient's age from a color photo of the retina with pretty good accuracy. These levels of changes are not things that we as clinicians will be able to tell -- we can tell if someone is a child versus an older adult, but not if someone is 70 vs 80," said Dr. Sunir Garg, a clinical spokesperson for the American Academy of Ophthalmology and professor of ophthalmology at Wills Eye Hospital in Philadelphia, who was not part of research team in the study.
"The really unique aspect of this paper is using that difference in a patient's real age compared to the age the computer thought a patient was to determine mortality. This is not something that we thought was possible," Garg said through mail.
However, the model failed to significantly predict an increased risk of death, in two disease groups: cardiovascular disease and cancer. The researchers explained that the reason could be that there might have been a smaller number of such cases in the population studied.