Civilization causes heart disease. That’s one way to look at data from researchers who found hardening of the arteries in 3,500-year-old mummies. The lesson is we may have to look beyond modern risk factors to fully understand heart disease.
We have an idealized image of living in ancient societies: fruits, nuts, berries, and the occasional wild animal meat. At the other end of the time warp, we look around us today and ascribe artery-clogging cardiovascular disease to modern risk factors. But now we have evidence from ancient Egyptian mummies that ancient societies suffered heart attacks and strokes, too.
The study, presented by Randall C. Thompson, M.D., professor of medicine at the Mid America Heart Institute in Kansas City, was conducted by a unique collaboration of imaging experts, Egyptologists and preservationists who sought the most direct evidence possible. Using six-slice computed X-ray tomography (CT) scans, they examined 20 mummies housed in the Museum of Antiquities in Cairo, Egypt to see if heart and blood vessel tissue was present and to learn its condition.
Definite atherosclerosis, in other words a build-up of fat, cholesterol, calcium and other substances in the inner walls of blood vessels, was present in three mummies and probable atherosclerosis was apparent in another three. Calcification was significantly more common in the mummies estimated to be 45 years or older at the time of death. Men and women were similarly affected.
Thus, clogged arteries is not only a disease of modern man, but was not unusual in humans living 3000 years ago.
Why? That’s unclear, but one researcher (L. Samuel Wann, MD) told me that once civilizations were established, farming took off and food stocks became more abundant and reliable. Perhaps, people ate more and gained weight – and the rest, as they say, is history.
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