According to one study, a simple non-invasive eye exam can predict the risk of a heart attack when combined with other information.
The researchers found that combining retinal blood vessel pattern information with traditional clinical factors allowed them to better identify participants’ risk of attack, compared with established models that only included demographics.
A summary, to be presented Monday at the annual conference of the European Society of Human Genetics in Vienna, details how they used data from the UK Biobank, which contains the medical and lifestyle records of 500,000 people, to calculate a measure called fractal dimension.
They then combined it into a model with factors such as age, sex, systolic blood pressure, body mass index, and smoking status, studying people in the database who had suffered a heart attack. also known as myocardial infarction or IM, after its retinal imaging. had been picked up.
Ana Villaplana-Velasco, a doctoral student at Usher and Roslin High School at Edinburgh University and the author who presented it, said: “Surprisingly, we found that our model was able to better classify low- and high-risk participants. “IM in the UK Biobank when compared to established models that only include demographics. The improvement in our model was even greater if we added a score related to the genetic propensity to develop MI.”
The researchers said their analysis found that there was a shared genetic basis between the fractal dimension and myocardial infarction.
The average age for a heart attack is 60, and they found that their model achieved its best predictive performance more than five years before the heart attack occurred. They hope that in the future, a simple retinal examination can provide enough information to identify people at risk.
“Calculating an individualized IM risk for those over 50 would seem appropriate,” Villaplana-Velasco said. “This would allow doctors to suggest behaviors that could reduce the risk, such as quitting smoking and maintaining normal cholesterol and blood pressure.”
Researchers believe that each condition may have a unique retinal variation profile and suggest that its findings may be helpful in identifying propensity for other diseases. Villaplana-Velasco said they would like to repeat the analysis separately on men and women to investigate whether a specific sex model for heart attack offers a better risk rating.
Professor Sir Nilesh Samani, Medical Director of the British Heart Foundation, said: “More research is needed to show that this improvement in prediction is robust. ‘incorporate these scans into routine clinical practice’.
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Dr James Ware, a cardiologist and lecturer in genomic medicine at Imperial College London and a researcher at the Medical Research Council, warned that the research had not been peer-reviewed and that the summary contained limited details, but added: “Approaches like this that use computer vision and / or machine learning to detect subtle vascular features predictive of future heart health look promising.” .