Science knows that reading your palm doesn’t really predict your future. However, a new study has revealed that if you turn your hand the other way around, you can gain crucial information about how long you might live.
A new study, last week in Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolismrevealed that a simple photograph of the back of your hand can help detect acromegaly – a rare and deadly hormonal disorder that is otherwise difficult to diagnose.
This condition, on average, reduces life expectancy by about a decade. If left untreated, it can cause life-threatening complications.
Acromegaly occurs when the body produces too much growth hormone, and tends to appear around middle age.
“Because the condition progresses so slowly, and because it is a rare disease, it is not uncommon for it to take up to a decade to be diagnosed,” explains the corresponding author of the study and endocrinologist at Kobe University, to . Hidenori Fukuoka.
Outside of the new study, they were recruited 725 participantsabout half of whom had acromegaly, came from 15 medical facilities in Japan.
More than 11,000 images of their hands were then used to train and validate a new AI model.
In the end, the model was able to identify patients with acromegaly with a positive predictive value of 0.88 and a negative predictive value of 0.93. This means that if the test result was positive, there was an 88% chance that the person actually had acromegaly. On the contrary, if the test result was negative, there was a 93% chance that the patient did not have acromegaly.
The AI model even outperformed human experts in endocrinology when they were given the same photographs.
Revolution in screenings?
Acromegaly affects approximately between 8 and 24 in 100,000 individuals.
Common symptoms include swelling of the extremities, headaches and facial changes.
Endocrinologists also consider changes in voice, facial expressions, and biochemical markers, as well as a person’s overall medical history.
However, as these changes develop gradually, early diagnosis remains difficult. Around a quarter of patients currently face diagnostic delays of more than 10 years.
“This study supports our hypothesis that acromegaly can be diagnosed just with images of hands with accuracy comparable to that reported for facial image-based AI diagnoses,” the researchers write.
