Retinal images could predict future risk of heart or lung disease

Want to know more about your future risk of developing heart or lung problems? Your retinal thickness might hold important clues.

Researchers have previously established links between retinal thickness and whole body health, but a new study provides more detail about the potential future risks.

Using data from 44,828 participants, an international research team found the thickness of the retina correlates with an increased risk of ocular, neurological and cardiovascular diseases. Most notably, this is the first study to find that a thinner retina increases someone’s risk of developing lung conditions like bronchitis or emphysema.

The data came from the UK Biobank, an enormous medical database including details about the health and genetics of around half a million people in the UK. The retinal images making up part of the data were captured using a non-invasive procedure called optical coherence tomography. Ophthalmologists routinely use this technique to determine a patient’s risk for various eye maladies, including macular degeneration and glaucoma. The procedure captures information about the retina – which is usually 0.5 millimetres thick – and its internal layers.

Nazlee Zebardast, one of the study’s authors at the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary and Harvard Medical School, hopes the study will eventually expand how optical coherence tomography is used, going beyond simply providing information about the eyes to providing future health information about the whole body.

“We have patients coming to our eye clinic all the time,” she says. “Wouldn’t it be great if we could tell from someone’s retinal image: ‘you look like you might have a high risk of sleep apnoea’, or ‘you might have a high risk of developing diabetes’?”

While exciting, this technology is still “a long way off” from immediate clinical application, says Anthony Khawaja at University College London. Researchers are still unsure why retinal biology might correspond to systemic health or what kind of causal mechanism might be driving the associations seen in this study and others. What’s more, in the research paper, Zederbast and her colleagues point out that a lack of genetic diversity within the UK Biobank sample limits the universal applicability of the conclusions: 94 per cent of the people who contributed their data to the database have white European ancestry.

Still, Zebardast is optimistic about the study’s future implications. She says if a prospective study can confirm these hypotheses – meaning, researchers tracking people for years to see whether a thinner or thicker retina actually does correspond to an elevated risk of later developing conditions like heart disease or pneumonia – then retinal imaging could emerge as a useful and non-invasive method for routine health screening.

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