Poorer vision linked to long-term cardiovascular risk
Each 0.1-unit increase on a scale where higher scores mean worse vision was associated with a 5.7% higher relative risk of major cardiovascular events.
Paper by Bowen Zhang, Xindi Wang, Zizhu Lian et al.
Dose-response
Limit: Vision’s added predictive value and usefulness in clinical care still need evaluation
Edited by Boris Djordjevic · AgingResearch.News
The prospective cohort study included 111,446 people with vision measurements in both eyes and no major cardiovascular events at baseline. Their mean age was 56.67 years, and 55.4% were women. Researchers analyzed vision in each person’s better-seeing eye.
Over a median follow-up of 14.17 years, 8,275 first cardiovascular events occurred. These were heart attacks, heart failure, strokes caused by blocked blood flow, or deaths from cardiovascular disease. After accounting for demographic, lifestyle, socioeconomic and health factors, each 0.1-unit increase on the vision scale, indicating worse vision, was associated with a 5.7% higher relative risk. People in the poorest-vision quarter also had higher risk than those in the best-vision quarter.
Why it matters
Vision and cardiovascular health are closely linked to aging and functional decline. This work addresses whether a readily available measure of function could help identify cardiovascular vulnerability as people age.
Caveats
This observational study cannot establish cause and effect and excluded people with major cardiovascular events at baseline. The authors said vision’s added predictive value and usefulness in clinical care still need evaluation.
- Heart failure
- Acute myocardial infarction
- Ischemic stroke
- Major adverse cardiovascular events
- Better-eye logMAR visual acuity
- Humans
The paper
Bowen Zhang, Xindi Wang, Zizhu Lian et al.
Frontiers in Medicine, Oct 30, 2026, CC BY, Accepted, not yet published
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