By akademiotoelektronik, 31/03/2022

What if your eye revealed the date of your death? | Slate.com

Reading time: 2 min — Spotted on Science Alert

The eye once again fascinates scientists with its complexity. Performing a scintigraphy – an examination which is used to analyze the organs and their functioning using a specific camera – of the eyeball could allow the medical profession to detect people in whom aging is faster, and therefore more at risk of premature death .

From one individual to another, the aging process can vary. But inspecting the retina is the best way to know the real biological age. The latter corresponds to the age of our body, unlike the physiological age (the age that we know, chronological). He is either younger than our age, which means very good health, or older, which indicates that the wear and tear on the body is greater than that of other people of the same age, or much older – in some cases incurable diseases, for example.

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Artificial intelligence has been developed in the UK to try to predict the years a patient has left to live by analyzing their eye. She examined fundus images of 47,000 adults to study the association between retinal age and mortality. According to the Science Alert website, "if the algorithm predicts that a person's retina is one year older than their actual age, their risk of death from any cause within eleven following years, increases by 2%. At the same time, his risk of dying from a cause other than cardiovascular disease or cancer increases by 3%.

However, scientists still do not understand the biological link between the eye and an individual's premature aging. The explanation may lie in the sensitivity of the retina, and the presence of nerves and blood vessels which would reveal the state of vascular and cerebral health.

According to their work, the cells present at the back of the eye could predict the onset of certain cardiovascular and kidney diseases. “The significant association between retinal age and non-cardiovascular/non-cancer mortality, together with the growing evidence of the link between the eye and the brain, may support the idea that the retina is the 'window' of neurological diseases”, specify the authors of the study.

The retina can be easily examined by artificial intelligences. With more research, scientists may soon be able to prevent disease and accurately determine when we die.