FILE - An ophthalmologist examine’s a patient’s eye. (Pascal Bachelet/BSIP/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)Researchers from the United Kingdom suggest a routine eye exam in conjunction with looking into past genetic data could help physicians predict whether or not a person could suffer a heart attack in the future.
A recent study out of the Usher and Roslin Institutes from the University of Edinburgh found that simply assessing the patterns of a patient’s blood vessels in their eyes along with traditional clinical factors could help predict a possible heart attack five years before it happens. "The discovery could inform development of a simple screening process where heart attack risk could be calculated when a person undergoes a routine eye test, according to research presented at the annual conference of the European Society of Human Genetics," according to a university news release.
A model was developed to compare data from 500,000 patients from the U.K. Biobank (UKB) which included age, sex, systolic blood pressure, body mass index and smoking status, according to a news release.
This data was combined with retinal images from each patient. "Strikingly, we discovered that our model was able to better classify participants with low or high MI (myocardial infarction, also known as a heart attack) risk in UKB when compared with established models that only include demographic data.