Study calculates age by examining the face, tongue and retina – 01/09/2024 – Balance

Chinese researchers have developed a new method to calculate people’s biological age by analyzing images of the face, tongue and retina. According to a study published last Tuesday (8) in the scientific journal PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences), the tool can be used to identify the risk of chronic diseases related to aging.

Biological age is an indicator used to measure the passage of time in our organisms. It takes into account the state of functionality of the human body, and may be greater or lesser than chronological age, depending, for example, on health care and environmental factors.

The new method can accurately calculate the difference between the two ages and identify cases of accelerated aging (when biological age is considerably higher than chronological age) that may be associated with the development of chronic diseases — also opening a window for early treatment .

Peking University researchers used artificial intelligence to process 3D images of 11,223 healthy volunteers and another 2,840 people with six chronic diseases (coronary heart disease, cardiovascular disease, chronic kidney disease, diabetes, hypertension and cerebrovascular accident).

The authors observed a considerable difference between the chronological and biological ages of the participants in the second group, which, according to the study, supports the thesis that chronic diseases lead to accelerated aging.

Regarding the greater risk of developing chronic diseases, they observed the prevalence of the six main types in the population and crossed them with data from volunteers who underwent screening. The result showed a statistically significant association between the lower risk of developing diseases and the greater agreement between biological and chronological age and increased risk for those who had signs of accelerated aging.

According to the publication, images of the face can provide indications of skin health, while images of the tongue offer information about the health of the oral microbiome. In turn, retinal images contain data about the neurological and cardiovascular system.

Other methods have already been used to estimate biological aging with high precision, such as analysis of brain images and DNA methylation markers (a type of molecular aging marker in DNA), but according to the study authors, the new model is more efficient. for integrating analyzes of different systems of the human body, in addition to being low cost and non-invasive.

The researchers conclude that the risk assessment for heart disease, diabetes, hypertension, stroke, among other health problems, despite being calculated, must also require “integrated information from multiple systems”.