Of course, no one really knows how long they’ll live for, and we can’t predict the future. However, science shows that there is a way we can guess our lifespan through our eyes, and it could possibly give us an idea of how long we will live.
- According to research, the retina (the tiny membrane important for our eyesight) can indicate our health status and how long we’ll live. It is already known that the retina worsens as we get older, but we didn’t know that people whose retinas are older than their actual age have higher mortality risk.
- Researchers kept an eye on 46,969 people between the ages of 40 and 69 for 11 years, and each person had their retinas examined. The test consists of comparing the retina’s “biological age” vs. the person’s chronological age, and through this, the scientists came up with something called “the retinal age gap.” They found that if those gaps were significant, the person had a higher chance of illness.
- The study showed that “1 in 20 people have a 10-year retinal age gap.” This means that more than half of the people whose eyes were examined were aging fast because their retinas looked older than their actual age. 51% of people had gaps of more than 3 years, 28% had 5 five years, and 4.5% had a gap of more than 10 years.
- Your eyes can also reveal chances to have Alzheimer’s disease. The same plaques that gather together in the brain, are also visible in your retina, and they look like spots when scanned.
