Standard photographs of the retina - the cheap, routine images taken at the back of the eye during many eye exams - can accurately predict many of the most common risk factors associated with developing Alzheimer's disease, according to a study of tens of thousands of patients published June 16 in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease.
The work was led by Ruogu Fang, a professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Florida, with collaborators including UF's Adam Woods and Meta researcher Yunchao Yang. Fang's argument for looking at the eye is essentially one of timing: Alzheimer's develops over decades, but most diagnostic tools pick up late-stage pathology, at a point when there is little left to intervene on. Retinal health, she says, offers a different kind of biomarker - one that could flag people at elevated risk far earlier in the process.
That distinction matters for anyone thinking about prevention. Identifying risk before symptoms appear opens a window for further testing and for addressing the lifestyle factors known to influence risk. And because retinal photography is inexpensive and already widespread in ordinary eye care, it is the sort of tool that could plausibly scale beyond specialist memory clinics.
An important boundary on the findings: the study showed that retinal images predict risk factors linked to Alzheimer's, not that they diagnose the disease itself. The research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation.