Human longevity is such a topic that everybody wants to discuss, especially when you have something to prove.
For now, it is a mystery to reveal who lives longer and who doesn’t. But scientists always want to know about a secret formula that could decide who will live longer.
If we believe the recent study conducted in this regard, there are many clues that you can refer to know such a thing.
As per a new research, there is at least one potential indicator that has the capacity to predict how long you will live. It’s nothing but a simple eye test.
Retinas Have Power to Predict Your Future?
Retina is a membrane that lines around the back of your eye having abundant light sensitive cells.
It has a tiny network of blood vessels. According to a new study, age of a person can be predicted after studying these retinal cells.
It’s a well known fact that cells in retina tend to deteriorate as we grow older. For example, Gluacoma is a disorder which becomes more common with age. It becomes more prominent with age and damages retinal cells as the person grow older.
And so, the retina is something that offers a kind of unique accessible window to determine different underlying pathological advances of neurological and systemic vascular diseases. It’s also known to be associated with an increased risk of mortality.
What the Study On Human Longevity Found?
The study to gauge human longevity conducted with more than 48,000 adults between the age of 40-69. Each of them had their retina scanned.
After scanning retina properly, they started scanning retina’s biological age as compared to that person’s chronological age. After conducting the above study, scientists found that there was an age gap that they called it as “retinal age gap”.
Scientists came to a conclusion that large retinal age gap was associated with almost 49-67% higher risk of mortality from any cause other than cancer or cardiovascular disease.
It was done after adjusting all other external factors like lifestyle habits, blood pressure, BMI and more.
Scientists also noted that with every one year age gap in a person, there was a 2% increase in the risk of death from any cause.
Why Is The Retina Relevant?
As we just mentioned above, retina is full of small blood vessels that have abundant of retinal cells.
In cases of retinopathy, older blood vessels paves way to newer blood vessels as they start damaging with age. This phenomenon leads to blindness.
This is what researches wrote, “Our novel findings have determined that the retinal age gap is an independent predictor of increased mortality risk, especially of non-cardiovascular disease/ non-cancer mortality. These findings suggest that retinal age may be a clinically significant biomarker of aging,” it said.
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