Pupil Size of Eyes Predict Death

Pupil size predicts death and hospital readmission in patients with heart failure, according to research published today in ESC Heart Failure, a journal of the European Society of Cardiology (ESC).

Around 26 million people worldwide currently live with heart failure. It is a life-threatening condition in which the heart is unable to pump enough blood to meet the body’s needs. Symptoms include shortness of breath, swollen limbs, and fatigue. Up to 45% of patients admitted to hospital with heart failure die within one year of admission and the majority die within five years of admission.

Pupil area is another way to assess autonomic function and has been used in patients with Parkinson’s disease and diabetes. This study examined whether pupil area could predict prognosis in patients with heart failure.

The study was conducted in 870 patients hospitalized for acute heart failure in 2012 to 2017. The average age was 67 years and 37% were women. Pupil area was measured in both eyes at least seven days after hospital admission. For the test, patients put on goggles, waited five minutes for their eyes to adapt to the dark, then photos were taken of the eyes. Patients were tested at a standard time (between 09:00 and 12:00) since the autonomic system is affected by time of day.

Comments

The Next Best Thing to Jezero Crater This Side of Mars

You may not be able to travel to Jezero Crater on , but you can visit the next best thing: Lake Salda, Turkey. Researchers are using their understanding of Lake Salda to help guide the Mars 2020 mission, which will drop the Perseverance rover into the crater to search for signs of ancient life. “One of the great things about visiting Lake Salda is it really gives you a sense of what it would have been like to stand on the shores of ancient Lake Jezero,” said Briony Horgan, a planetary scientist at Purdue University and member of the Perseverance science team. “Carbonates are important because they are really good at trapping anything that existed within that environment, such as microbes, organics, or certain textures that provide evidence of past microbial life,” said Brad Garczynski, a graduate student at Purdue who works with Horgan. “But before we go to Jezero, it is really important to gain context on how these carbonates form on Earth in order to focus our search for signs f...

Party Pairs

Atoms in a gas can seem like partiers at a nanoscopic rave, with particles zipping around, pairing up, and flying off again in a seemingly random fashion. And yet physicists have come up with formulas that predict this behavior, even when the atoms are extremely close together and can tug and pull on each other in complicated ways. The environment within the nucleus of a single atom seems similar, with protons and neutrons also dancing about. But because the nucleus is such a compact space, scientists have struggled to pin down the behavior of these particles, known as nucleons, in an atom’s nucleus. Models that describe the interactions of nucleons that are far apart broken down when the particles pair up and interact at close range. Now an MIT-led team has simulated the behavior of protons and neutrons in several types of atomic nuclei, using some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. The team explored a wide range of nuclear interaction models and found, surprising...

Time-Stretch Infrared Spectroscopy

Spectroscopy is an important tool of observation in many areas of science and industry. Infrared spectroscopy is especially important in the world of chemistry where it is used to analyze and identify different molecules. The current state-of-the-art method can make approximately 1 million observations per second. University of Tokyo researchers have greatly surpassed this figure with a new method about 100 times faster. From climate science to safety systems, manufacture to quality control of foodstuffs, infrared spectroscopy is used in so many academic and industrial fields that it’s a ubiquitous, albeit invisible, part of everyday life. In essence, infrared spectroscopy is a way to identify what molecules are present in a sample of a substance with a high degree of accuracy. The basic idea has been around for decades and has undergone improvements along the way. In general, infrared spectroscopy works by measuring infrared light transmitted or reflected from molecules in a sa...

Pratham-Tech-Talks

Search This Blog