45% of Mummies Had Heart Disease
"A mummy enters the CT scanner at St. Luke's Hospital in Kansas City, Mo. It was one of 52 mummies examined for signs of heart disease." Source of caption and photo: online version of the Omaha World-Herald article quoted and cited below.
(p. 6A) Atherosclerosis -- hardening of the arteries -- was surprisingly widespread during ancient times, at least among the Egyptian mummies examined by an international team of scientists and heart specialists.
Their research, whose results were presented April 3 in New Orleans at the annual meeting of the American College of Cardiology, found that 45 percent of the mummies they put through CT scans had signs of atherosclerosis.
That raises questions about whether hardening of the arteries is the modern disease that many think it is.
"We found it so easily and frequently that it appears to have been common in this society," said Randall Thompson, a cardiologist at St. Luke's Hospital in Kansas City.
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