Researchers from London's Moorfields Eye Hospital claim that using artificial intelligence, Parkinson's disease can be predicted through eye scans with an average seven-year head start.
This is the first time anyone has shown these findings several years before diagnosis," according to a hospital press statement.
This paper shows how eye data can be used by technology to detect symptoms and changes that are too subtle for people to notice. Moorfields ophthalmologist Alastair Denniston continued, "We can now identify very early symptoms of Parkinson's, bringing up new therapy options.
According to the hospital, the advanced 3-D scan, formally known as optical coherence tomography, takes "less than a minute" and provides a study of the patient's retina "down to a thousandth of a millimeter."
Researchers noted that while Parkinson's disease cannot be detected through "brain imaging," "the retina provides a minimally invasive window into the central nervous system and can be imaged rapidly using modern high-resolution devices."
The macular ganglion cell-inner plexiform and the retinal nerve fiber are the two optical layers with which Parkinson's is most frequently related during eye exams.
The reported results state that "the relationship between retinal layer thicknesses and incident Parkinson disease had not yet been explored."
However," the statement continues, "findings in early and prodromal Parkinson disease do corroborate our results.
In terms of the technology's ability to identify the neurodegenerative illness, researcher Siegfried Wagner is "amazed.
"While we are not yet ready to predict whether an individual will develop Parkinson's, we hope that this method could soon become a prescreening tool for people at risk of the disease," the researcher added.
However, the technique need not end there.
Similar developments in eye scans, known as "oculomics," have sped up the diagnosis of other neurological conditions and diseases, such as schizophrenia, multiple sclerosis, and Alzheimer's.
Finding signs of a number of diseases before symptoms emerge means that, in the future, people could have the time to make lifestyle changes to prevent some conditions from arising, and clinicians could delay the onset and impact of life-changing neurodegenerative disorders," Wagner said.
