Your Eyes Could Reveal How Rapidly You’re Ageing

You already know your chronological age (the amount of years you’ve been alive). But working out your biological age – the “wear and tear happening inside the body at a cellular and molecular level” – isn’t as simple as counting candles on a cake.

However, there are clues.

Scientists think that how long we can stand on one leg may reveal how well our brains are doing, for instance.

And now, researchers have suggested that a scan of the retina, or the light-sensitive tissue at the back of our eyes, could give us a good guess at people’s biological ageing, too.

The retina is closely linked to brain and heart health. Patients’ cardiovascular status might be more visible from the tissue’s network of veins, while their brain ageing may affect areas like the optic nerve and neurosensory retinal layers (cells that convert light into electrical impulses for the mind).

As a result, scientists have been using the area to gauge people’s health status for years now. And the difference between a person’s biological retinal age and their chronological age, known as the retinal age gap, has become a marker of call ageing and even mortality risk.

We, therefore, already have a lot of retinal images that can be used to work out how old someone’s eye seems to be. But, in this study, researchers ran those pictures, along with other data from previous papers, through more advanced technology.

They also added new research and relied on more healthy pictures of retinas, which not all previous studies had done.

All in, they uploaded 29,530 retinal scans from 7,535 participants. These were then used to work out the biological ages of 7,416 new participants, who provided 14,832 images.

Using these tools, the new system was able to predict how old people were in years (chronological age) with an average error of 2.5-2.7 years, which is good in comparison to other retinal scans.

As for their biological (tissue and organ) age, the people with retinas that this system deemed as older on a cellular level were more likely to smoke, have diabetes, or face macular degeneration.

Meanwhile, a separate team has used artificial intelligence to help work out people’s biological age – also from a retinal scan.

The study’s first author, Olga Trofimova, said: “A higher retinal age is associated with an increased risk of cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, cancer, dementia and death over the following 15 years.

“It is also associated with markers of metabolism, inflammation, cognitive abilities and lifestyle.”

Interestingly, the research she was involved with found that women’s retinas tended to be biologically younger than men’s of the same age.

But after menopause, “the pattern is reversed, with a higher retinal age and a less favorable health profile”.

Blood pressure also tends to follow this trend.

We’ll need more research to find out how accurate these scans are and how useful they might be for healthcare.

Still, researchers think studies like these prove “the potential of retinal imaging as an accessible tool for capturing systemic ageing signals”.