Even Ancients had Heart disease and arteries clogged; CT scans of ancient mummies shows
Today Heart Attacks because of clogged arteries are the greatest killer in the world. Many aver it is the curse of the modern lifestyle. But it seems clogged arteries and heart conditions have been plaguing the human populations for a long time. The Scientists have done CT scans on 137 mummies from across four continents and found artery plaque in the mummies.
It seems even the Bronze Age man from 5000 years ago has this issue:
“Turns out even a Bronze Age guy from 5,000 years ago had calcified, carotid arteries,” Finch says, referring to Ötzi the Iceman, a natural mummy who lived around 3200 B.C. and was discovered frozen in a glacier in the Italian Alps in 1991.
Now, someone would say that only the royalty and the high of the land were mummified, but this study looked across the cultures, lifestyles and strata. And that is what makes this stutdy significant.
With Gregory Thomas of Long Beach Memorial, Finch was part of a team that previously showed Egyptian mummies had calcified patches on their arteries indicative of advanced atherosclerosis (from the Greek “athero,” meaning “gruel,” and “scler,” meaning “hard”).
But ancient Egyptians tended to mummify only royalty or those who had privileged lives. The new study led by Thomas and Randall Thompson of Saint Luke’s Mid America Heart Institute examined mummies from four drastically different climates and diets—and from cultures that mummified regular people, including ancient Peruvians, Ancestral Puebloans, the Unangans of the Aleutian Islands, and ancient Egyptians.
“Our research shows that we are all at risk for atherosclerosis, the disease that causes heart attacks and strokes—all races, diets, and lifestyles,” says Thomas.
