Cardiovascular disease in Mummies discovered
We have all heard, seen and read all the articles, programs, and warnings from the medical experts for many years now, about how not getting enough exercise, eating too much fast food, meat and cholesterol rich foods, as well as smoking tobacco causes the very high rates of death and disability from cardiovascular disease in our society. That included outcomes such as heart disease, atherosclerosis, diabetes, and strokes.
Those medical experts always blamed the resulting illness on the lifestyles of modern humans, and said we had to eat in a more old fashioned manner with more vegetables and fibre and participate in more physical activities like people of old did. Well, it turns out that they might have been wrong, and that cardiovascular and heart diseases are not the result of ‘modern lifestyles’ at all. These same conditions have been found in a representative selection of mummies in recent investigations carried out by a team from the Mid America Heart Institute in the USA and reported recently in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The American and Egyptian investigators used computed tomography whole body scans, which are a type of x-ray, on 22 mummies that they were allowed access to in the Egyptian National Museum of Antiquities in Cairo. The team was aware that these people had lived in the years ranging from about 1980 BC, to 334 AD, and that half of them were thought to be over 45 years old when they died, in an era where the average life span was only about age 50.
Of the 22 preserved bodies, 16 had heart and blood vessel tissue that was still intact enough to be analysed with this latest in technology. What they found was that nine of the mummies had definite or probable hardening of the arteries, which was a complete surprise. The medical team reported being taken aback by the similar appearance of vascular calcification in the mummies and their present-day heart disease patients, which was something they had not anticipated. In their report these medicos said they are now having to rethink their established assumptions about cardiovascular disease being avoidable, and are asking if these conditions are perhaps simply a normal development of human beings of any place and time?
However, one of the medical investigators disagreed with that assumption by pointing out that the mummies would all have been high status individuals living in a pharaoh’s court, and would therefore have had access to an unusually varied and rich diet compared to the rest of the population of Egypt at that time.
In our modern age of plenty, for most of the ordinary population, more people are better off than at any time in human history, and have abundant lives that would equate only to the rich in the past: in fact we all are living in the equivalent of a pharaohs court with our rich meats and salty diets. Medical science is learning much from such studies but the take-home message for today is that, in whatever age you live, if you eat like a rich person you will die like a rich person – of heart disease!
Reference: Computed Tomographic Assessment of Atherosclerosis in Ancient Egyptian Mummies, Vol. 302 No. 19 November 18, 2009 Journal of the American Medical Association.
