A score made up of a series of visual measurements taken from images of the retinal blood vessels at the back of the eye can significantly improve stroke prediction, shows new research.
The study, led by the Hong Kong Polytechnic University and the University of Melbourne, identified 29 retinal vascular features that significantly increased a person’s risk for stroke.
Each standard deviation increase in these features raised a person’s risk by 10–19% and when added to a model including other risk factors for stroke the addition of the retinal measures significantly improved the accuracy of the model
As reported in the journal Heart, the research team used data from 45,161 participants of the UK Biobank. During a median follow-up time of 12.5 years, 749 strokes occurred in the cohort.
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What would you do with the information? If you found you were at high risk of stroke, what then? All the advice on how to reduce stroke risk is stuff I’m doing anyway…
Well, I guess it might be a matter of degree… if you suddenly found out you were at high risk for a stroke, perhaps you’d put more effort into some areas and more testing (e.g. for cardio risk, etc.).
