45% of Mummies Had Heart Disease

MummyCTscan2011-04-25.jpg
“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.

For the full story, see:
MC CLATCHY NEWSPAPERS. “Hardened Arteries Go Back Centuries.” Omaha World-Herald (Mon., April 18, 2011): 6A.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *