Eyes may show how quickly the body ages
Scientists from South Korea have discovered that retinal analysis can help assess a person's biological age. The study, based on nearly 30,000 images, showed a link between retinal health, lifestyle, and diseases such as diabetes and smoking.
Scientists at Seoul National University in South Korea have refined the retinal age gap (RAG) method, which estimates biological age from retinal images. Biological age reflects the degree of age-related changes in the body and does not always match chronological age. The researchers trained an artificial intelligence model on 29,530 retinal images from 7,535 individuals, then tested its accuracy on a separate set of 14,832 images from 7,416 participants. The algorithm estimated chronological age with an average error of about 2.5–2.7 years. Analysis showed that an increased RAG is associated with diabetes (average difference of 2.52 years), smoking (0.5 years for current smokers and 0.46 for former smokers), age-related macular degeneration (0.6 years), and cataracts (1.86 years). However, scientists caution that cataract results may be affected by image blurring. The authors emphasize that the method is currently more suitable for studying aging patterns in large groups than for individual health predictions.