“The Link Between Retinal Age and Risk of Mortality: Latest studies in Eye and Cardiovascular Diseases”

2023-05-28 18:00:00

Studies have compared eye funds from volunteers with those obtained from patients monitored for cardiovascular diseases.

This article is taken from the monthly Sciences et Avenir – La Recherche n°915, dated May 2023.

To have the age of his arteries but also that of his retina. This is in summary the result of an international study published in 2022 in the British Journal of Ophthalmology. She was interested in the link between the so-called retinal age, that calculated by an algorithm according to the appearance at the fundus of the arteries irrigating the retina, with the risk of mortality.

Read alsoThe retina, this incredible mirror of our health

Using powerful AI applied to nearly 47,000 fundus images, the researchers demonstrated that this retinal age is a robust biomarker of aging, very closely linked to the risk of death. But beware, this study does not claim to predict exactly the time left to live! She demonstrates that “if the retinal age calculated by the algorithm is more than one year older than the actual age of the person, the risk of death from any cause during the next eleven years increases by 2%.

Other work has compared eye funds from volunteers with those taken from patients followed for cardiovascular disease. Thus, a study published last winter in Nature Machine Intelligence details the performance of an algorithm aimed at identifying people at risk of having a myocardial infarction within a year of the eye exam. This time, the team of Pr Alejandro Frangi (University of Leeds, United Kingdom), made up of cardiologists, bio-engineers and mathematicians, succeeded in linking the abnormalities found on the fundus with the size and the efficiency of the ventricular cavities, data calculated during the performance of ultrasound scans, a reflection of cardiac function.

This work carried out on 5,000 participants demonstrated that the algorithm was able to indicate a high risk of myocardial infarction, with an accuracy of between 70% and 80%. “This tech[…]

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