ScienceAlert: “A quick and pain-free scan of the human eyeball could one day help doctors identify ‘fast agers’, who are at greater risk of early mortality. Getting older obviously has an impact on everybody’s body, but just because two people have the same number of years under their belt doesn’t mean they are physically declining at the same rate. Looking deep into a person’s eyes could be a far better way to measure their true biological age, and this could provide a glimpse into the future health of patients. A machine learning model has now been taught to predict a person’s years of life simply by looking at their retina, which is the tissue at the back of the eye. The algorithm is so accurate, it could predict the age of nearly 47,000 middle-aged and elderly adults in the United Kingdom within a bracket of 3.5 years.  Just over a decade after these retinas were scanned, 1,871 individuals had died, and those who had older-looking retinas were more likely to fall in this group. For instance, if the algorithm predicted a person’s retina was a year older than their actual age, their risk of death from any cause in the next 11 years went up by 2 percent. At the same time, their risk of death from a cause other than cardiovascular disease or cancer went up by 3 percent. The findings are purely observational, which means we still don’t know what is driving this relationship at a biological level…”