One day, a quick scan of your face may be able to tell you how much you’re aging and whether you’re at risk for developing certain diseases.
Chinese scientists compared the heat emitted from a person’s nose, cheeks, and around the eyes:An ideal monitoring and screening tool for healthy aging” “.
An artificial intelligence program trained on facial temperature data from 2,811 Chinese people aged between 21 and 88 years old identified several facial temperature patterns that could suggest a person’s “biological clock.”
For example, they found that the temperature of the nose decreases more rapidly with age than other parts of the face, whereas the temperature around the eyes tends to increase with age.
This means that if you have a warm nose and cool eyes, your facial thermometer may move more slowly.
But what does it have to do with human health?
The researchers found that an individual’s temperature profile was linked to certain lifestyle factors and metabolic health. The facial temperature profile of people with diabetes was more than six years higher than that of healthy people of the same age.
In fact, the machine learning model was able to automatically process and analyze heat maps of a person’s face and predict with over 80 percent accuracy whether they had metabolic disorders such as fatty liver disease or diabetes.
In the study, people with metabolic disorders tended to have higher temperatures around their eyes than healthy age- and sex-matched people.
Additionally, participants with higher blood pressure had increased temperatures around the eyes and cheeks, and men with high blood pressure generally had cooler noses.
“The body temperature clock is so closely related to metabolic diseases that previous facial imaging models have been unable to predict these diseases.” To tell Jindong Jackie Han from Peking University in China;
“Facial thermal imaging has great potential for early diagnosis and intervention of diseases, so we hope to apply it in clinical settings.”
Even among people born in the same year, some have biological clocks that run faster or slower, so the rate at which people age varies from person to person.
Scientists have been trying for years to devise ways to put a timetable on this hidden health indicator, but aside from non-invasive options like scanning a person’s eyeballs, it’s been difficult to come up with a test that measures the physical signs of biological aging, particularly in the blood, in a way that’s quick, convenient, or affordable.
The researchers say human faces contain a “rich amount of information” that is easily accessible for exactly this purpose. Assert.
Although it is known that a person’s core body temperature decreases with age, little is known about how facial temperature changes over time. the study frequently Higher body temperature has been linked to a higher metabolic rate, and the same now appears to be true for facial temperature.
The current study was limited to a sample of data collected from the Chinese population, and it is unclear whether the results can be generalized to other populations. Because facial heat can also be affected by the environment and emotions, subjects were photographed in a calm state in a temperature-controlled room.
To investigate why facial thermal images change with age, the researchers analyzed blood test results from 57 healthy subjects from a Chinese hospital, as well as thermal and 3D images of the faces of this small group.
The team found that elevated temperatures around the eyes and cheeks were associated with increased cellular activity related to inflammation.
In another study, researchers asked 23 participants to jump rope every day for two weeks to see if exercise would affect their facial thermal “age.” By the end of the study, participants’ thermal ages had decreased by an average of five years, while participants of the same age who did not jump rope saw no significant difference.
More research is needed to confirm and explain these associations, but the results are promising enough that the researchers plan to continue investigating whether facial thermal imaging can predict healthy aging in other ways as well.
This study Cell metabolism.
