A study of 28,657 UK Biobank participants published in the journal GeroScience on 9 October 2026 reports that people scoring higher on a lifestyle questionnaire called the Brain Care Score tend to have marginally thicker retinal tissue on eye scans. Researchers led by investigators at The Chinese University of Hong Kong compared the score, a composite measure developed at the McCance Center for Brain Health, against optical coherence tomography scans held in the Biobank. Each five-point increase in score was associated with a thicker retinal nerve fibre layer and a thicker ganglion cell layer. The differences were very small, at roughly 1.2% and 0.5% of the cohort averages respectively. The study is cross-sectional and observational, so it cannot show that looking after cardiovascular and lifestyle risk factors causes the retinal difference, and the authors say the temporal order cannot be established.
What the authors said the study cannot show
The physical and lifestyle components of the score accounted for the associations, while the social and emotional domain showed no independent link. In a subgroup of 14,656 participants with blood metabolomic profiling, lipid and amino acid patterns explained a modest share of the association, which the authors put at under 3% to about 11% and describe as exploratory. UK Biobank volunteers are healthier than the general population and predominantly of European ancestry, the retinal age measure correlates only moderately with chronological age, and the Brain Care Score is still described as a prototype. The work was funded by Hong Kong public research bodies and the National Natural Science Foundation of China, not by industry.
What this means in practice
Nothing here changes what anyone should do, and the researchers do not claim otherwise. The score combines cardiovascular and lifestyle risk factors of the sort UK clinicians already ask about at a routine health check, and the paper found it was the physical and lifestyle parts of it that carried the association. What the paper adds is a possible measurement route, since a routine eye scan might eventually carry a readable signal about those factors. The paper reports no finding about any supplement, and the metabolomic patterns it describes were measured in participants’ blood, not produced by anything they were given, so it carries no read-across to anything in the Perqen catalogue.
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