I received some perturbing news from my optometrist before Christmas.
Anticipating needing a stronger prescription for my astigmatism-plagued eyes, a self-diagnosis that the eye test confirmed, I was also told that I had sunburnt eyeballs. Overexposure to ultraviolet rays had created some damage on the whites of my eyes close to the corneas.
Really bad eye sunburn, known as photokeratitis, can be quite serious and require surgery to fix. Mine is relatively mild and should heal itself. I invested in a pair of wraparound prescription sunglasses, which I’ll be wearing whenever I venture out into the sun from now on.
Our eyes are a useful barometer of our wellbeing. A yellow appearance to the whites of your eyes can indicate liver disease. If you’ve a cold or hay fever they can appear bloodshot. The blood vessels at the back of the eyes can be examined by an ophthalmologist or optometrist to detect signs of diabetes.
A couple of studies published last week also reveal the deep links between the condition of your eyes and your overall health and lifestyle. One, based on a large survey of medical records in Britain and published in PLoS One, found that people born in the late 1960s were 10 per cent more likely to be nearsighted than those born three decades earlier.
Nearsightedness, or myopia, means that you can see objects near to you clearly, but objects further away are blurry. In the UK sample, the largest increase was in cases of adult-onset myopia, though three quarters of the cases were mild. Meanwhile, the number of children diagnosed with severe myopia doubled. So why are the later baby boomers more likely to be nearsighted than those born in the previous decades?
There’s a complicated mix of genetic and environmental factors involved, but the researchers suggest that changes in children’s nutrition over time and increases in screen time both in and out of education and work could be responsible. They point to previous studies that found a strong association between education level and nearsightedness. The more time we spend studying and looking at screens, the more likely our sight is to suffer.
A paper in the British Journal of Ophthalmology examined images of the human retina, nerve tissue at the back of the eyes, to see if they could predict whether someone was ageing at a faster rate than their chronological age and therefore be at higher risk of earlier death.
Using artificial intelligence software, scientists analysed the images to predict the ages of about 47,000 adult participants from the UK. The age predictions were accurate to within 3.5 years. Following up on the participants 11 years later, the scientists found that the ones the AI program had guessed were older than their actual age, were more likely to have died.
They suggest a “retinal age gap” exists between your chronological age and your biological age.
Artificial intelligence scanning retina images could underpin screening programmes that identify those more likely to need medical attention, earlier than their age may suggest.
The eyes are our windows on the world, but they will increasingly serve to keep tabs on our health.
Originally published on stuff.co.nz.
Photo credit Bacila Vlad, Unsplash
PETER GRIFFIN 