A new study from McMaster University and the Population Health Research Institute (PHRI) has found that the tiny blood vessels in your eyes may hold important clues about how fast you’re aging and how likely you are to develop heart disease.
The study suggests that one day, a simple scan of your eyes might help doctors catch serious health problems earlier.
The research team discovered that the pattern and shape of blood vessels in the retina—the back part of your eye—can reflect the condition of the small blood vessels throughout your entire body.
These small vessels are important because they carry oxygen and nutrients to all your organs. When they become damaged, it can lead to heart disease, stroke, dementia, and other serious illnesses.
What makes this discovery even more exciting is that eye scans are noninvasive, quick, and painless. Unlike many medical tests, they don’t require needles or machines that go inside the body. That means they could become an easy and affordable tool to spot early signs of aging and disease.
To conduct the study, researchers looked at data from over 74,000 people. They used eye scans, genetic information, and blood tests from four major groups of participants in Canada, the UK, and other countries.
These included people from the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging, the UK Biobank, the GoDARTS study in Scotland, and the international PURE study.
They found that people whose retinal blood vessels were simple and had fewer branches were more likely to have signs of biological aging. These signs included more inflammation in the body and a higher risk of dying sooner.
In contrast, people with healthier, more complex blood vessel patterns in their eyes tended to live longer and had fewer heart problems.
The researchers also studied blood proteins and genetic markers to learn more about what causes these changes in the eyes.
They found two key proteins—MMP12 and IgG–Fc receptor IIb—that were linked to inflammation and blood vessel aging. These proteins could become future targets for new medications that slow aging and reduce heart disease risk.
Professor Marie Pigeyre, who led the study, says that the eyes offer a unique window into the health of the body’s entire circulatory system. Since it’s so easy to look at the eyes using modern imaging tools, this could open up new ways to check on a person’s health before major problems arise.
Right now, diagnosing aging-related diseases like heart disease or dementia often requires many different tests. In the future, a single eye scan might do a lot of that work. But more research is needed before eye scans can fully replace other clinical exams.
This study helps scientists better understand how aging affects the small blood vessels in our body and how this process can lead to serious illness. By identifying key proteins involved in this process, the study also points to possible ways to prevent or treat age-related health problems.
In summary, your eyes might one day help doctors see how healthy your heart is and how fast your body is aging. That’s a powerful reason to pay attention to eye health—not just for vision, but for your whole body.
If you care about heart disease, please read studies about a big cause of heart failure, and common blood test could advance heart failure treatment.
For more health information, please see recent studies about a new way to repair human heart, and results showing drinking coffee may help reduce heart failure risk.
The study is published in Science Advances.
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