Association between cardiovascular health metrics and retinal ageing

The study aims to investigate associations between cardiovascular health (CVH) metrics and retinal ageing indexed by retinal age gap. A total of 26,354 participants from the UK Biobank study with available CVH metrics and qualified retinal imaging were included in the present analysis. CVH included 7 metrics (smoking, physical activity, diet, body mass index [BMI], total cholesterol, blood pressure [BP], blood glucose). These were summarized to classify the overall CVH as poor (0–7), intermediate (8–10) or ideal (11–14). Retinal age gap was defined as the difference between biological age predicted by fundus images and chronological age. Accelerated and non-accelerated retinal ageing was defined if retinal age gap was in the upper or lower 50% quantiles of the study population, respectively. Linear and logistic regression models estimated the association of overall CVH and each metric of CVH with retinal age gap respectively. Our results showed that in the fully adjusted model, each one-unit score increase in overall CVH was negatively associated with retinal age gap (odds ratio [OR] = 0.89, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.87-0.92, P < 0.001). Compared with poor overall CVH, people with intermediate and ideal overall CVH had significantly lower retinal age gap (OR = 0.76, 95%CI: 0.67–0.85, P < 0.001; OR = 0.58, 95%CI: 0.50–0.67, P < 0.001). Similar associations were found between overall CVH and accelerated retinal ageing. CVH metrics including smoking, BMI, BP, and blood glucose were also significantly associated with higher retinal age gap. Taken together, we found a significant and inverse dose-response association between CVH metrics and retinal age gap, indicating that maintaining healthy metrics especially smoking, BMI, BP, and blood glucose may be crucial to slow down biological ageing. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s11357-023-00743-3.