Oculomics: A Crusade Against the Four Horsemen of Chronic Disease.

Abstract

Chronic, non-communicable diseases present a major barrier to living a long and healthy life. In many cases, early diagnosis can facilitate prevention, monitoring, and treatment efforts, improving patient outcomes. There is therefore a critical need to make screening techniques as accessible, unintimidating, and cost-effective as possible. The association between ocular biomarkers and systemic health and disease (oculomics) presents an attractive opportunity for detection of systemic diseases, as ophthalmic techniques are often relatively low-cost, fast, and non-invasive. In this review, we highlight the key associations between structural biomarkers in the eye and the four globally leading causes of morbidity and mortality: cardiovascular disease, cancer, neurodegenerative disease, and metabolic disease. We observe that neurodegenerative disease is a particularly promising target for oculomics, with biomarkers detected in multiple ocular structures. Cardiovascular disease biomarkers are present in the choroid, retinal vasculature, and retinal nerve fiber layer, and metabolic disease biomarkers are present in the eyelid, tear fluid, lens, and retinal vasculature. In contrast, only the tear fluid emerged as a promising ocular target for the detection of cancer. The retina is a rich source of oculomics data, the analysis of which has been enhanced by artificial intelligence-based tools. Although not all biomarkers are disease-specific, limiting their current diagnostic utility, future oculomics research will likely benefit from combining data from various structures to improve specificity, as well as active design, development, and optimization of instruments that target specific disease signatures, thus facilitating differential diagnoses.