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The Lancet
Researchers conduct an MRI on a mummy from Egypt, in search of evidence of clogged arteries.
From the Andes to Alaska and ancient Egypt, people suffered from hardening of the arteries even 4,000 years ago, researchers reported on Sunday, suggesting heart disease may not be the fault of modern living, after all.
The team looked at mummies preserved in the cold or dry heat and found fully a third had clear evidence of clogged arteries. The findings, presented at a meeting of the American College of Cardiology and also published in the Lancet medical journal, build on earlier studies that looked at ancient Egyptian mummies.
Signs of artery disease in Egyptian mummies was believed to support the idea that a life of leisure, with plenty of rich food, is the main cause of heart disease. This broader study, however, found signs of heart disease in the remains of people who would have been far from wealthy or idle.
“The fact that we found similar levels of atherosclerosis in all of the different cultures we studied, all of whom had very different lifestyles and diets, suggests that atherosclerosis may have been far more common in the ancient world than previously thought,” says cardiologist Randall Thompson of of Saint Luke’s Mid America Heart Institute in Kansas City, who led the study.
“A common assumption is that the rise in levels of atherosclerosis is predominantly lifestyle-related, and that if modern humans could emulate pre-industrial or even pre-agricultural lifestyles, that atherosclerosis, or at least its clinical manifestations, would be avoided,” Thompson added.
The Lancet/Randall Thompson
This mummy shows signs of heart disease, researchers, found
“Our findings seem to cast doubt on that assumption, and at the very least, we think they suggest that our understanding of the causes of atherosclerosis is incomplete, and that it might be somehow inherent to the process of human aging.”
Thompson’s team looked at 137 different mummies, using MRI scans to find the signs of calcification that mark artery disease. Calcium builds up in the “plaques” that clog arteries, making them hard and also making it easy to spot them on scans.
The mummies came from Peru, where bodies often mummified naturally when left in cold, dry caves high in the mountains; from the southwestern U.S, where dry air can mummify bodies; from the Aleutian Islands of Alaska, where the cold can mummify remains; and from Egypt.
The Lancet/Randall Thompson
Randall Thompson of Saint Luke's Mid America Heart Institute in Kansas City and colleagues found clear signs of heart disease in a third of 137 mummies they studied from around the world.
About 38 percent of the mummies from Egypt had signs of atherosclerosis. A quarter of the mummies from Peru did, 40 percent of ancestors of Pueblo Indians from the U.S. Southwest and three out of the five Unangans from the Aleutian Islands.
“None of the cultures were known to be vegetarian. Physical activity was probably prominent in all these of civilizations without animal or vehicle transport,” the researchers wrote.
But they would have eaten very different diets. “Indigenous food plants varied greatly over the wide geographical distance between these regions of the world. Fish and game were present in all of the cultures, but protein sources varied from domesticated cattle among the Egyptians to an almost entirely marine diet among the Unangans,” the researchers wrote.
The Aleutian Islanders would have led a hard life, venturing out on kayaks to hunt seal and to fish, and they lived in underground homes to escape the extreme cold weather. Andean peoples would have been fit, and also unlikely to have lived easy lives.
What did they have in common? Probably a lot of untreated infections, the researchers said.
“All four populations lived at a time when infections would have been a common aspect of daily life and the major cause of death. Antibiotics had yet to be developed and the environment was nonhygienic.”
Doctors know that infection can be linked to heart and artery disease. One marker of heart disease is inflammation, as measured by a compound called C-reactive protein. Could infection have somehow kept arteries inflamed and prone to clogging?
“This would be consistent with the accelerated atherosclerosis experienced by modern-day patients with rheumatoid arthritis and systemic lupus erythematosus (commonly known as lupus),” the researchers wrote.
A study published in the new England Journal of Medicine in 2003 found about 37 percent of patients with lupus had atherosclerosis.
Heart disease is the No. 1 killer of Americans, causing about a quarter of all deaths. And half of these are linked to cardiovascular disease, much of it so-called hardening of the arteries, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
It's hard to say how common atherosclerosis is in the population as compared to the mummies, because few Americans get full-body scans that would show it, but a study last year of Afghanistan and Iraq veterans who died or were killed showed 8.5 percent had atherosclerosis in or around the heart, compared to 77 percent of Korean war veterans and 45 percent of Vietnam War veterans. Doctors believe widely used medications to lower cholesterol may have been a factor in the different rates.
Related links:
- Mummies show that even rich Egyptians were in poor health
- Egyptian mummy's curse was blocked arteries
- Heart disease found in Egyptian mummies
- Egyptian mummy shows signs of a rare, painful disease
- 'Maiden' Inca mummy had a lung infection
- Hallucinogens found in Andean mummy's hair
Leave a Comment:
Well, that was interesting. Who's for pizza?
who knew they had the "McPharaoh " 3000 yrs ago !
Vegetarian diet definitely helps in avoiding clogged arteries. It is definitely diet related problem.
Absolutely - and that's the takeaway from this article. They say that none of these cultures were vegetarian, and most of them led difficult lives with a lot of physical exertion. All of them ate fish, game, or both, and the article is clear about that. Hello!! THAT'S THE PROBLEM!!
Furthermore, the last sentence of this article is disgusting. There's no mention of the differing rations that soldiers would have eaten in the Korean, Vietnam, and Iraq/Afghan conflicts. They (doctors) immediately assume it's because of cholesterol medication. Two points - 1. What was their diet? and 2. Why did they need cholesterol medication to begin with? Doctors today are so pharmaceutical-centric it's getting to the point I even view their words with a healthy dose of skepticism.
Another hit song for the Bangles..."Clog Like an Egyptian"
Yeah, are we really supposed to believe that a huge percentage of presumably mostly young (20-50-year-old), fit soldiers with no heart problems at all had been pounding statins before they were killed? Does the military really feed soldiers a drug that has no expected benefit at their age but can cause muscle pain and weakness? Or does the fact that sedentary 50-year-olds are popping these pills magically change the inflammation in the arteries of active 30-year-olds in the same culture?
This article is paid for by the junk food industries. It is not real journalism. Read the book Trust Me, I'm Lying, and you will see how mainstream media is used to sell sell sell and is almost always propaganda for corporations such as pharma companies, etc.
@Jeff
Relax dude. The reason for the high incidents of clogged arteries from Soldiers going back to WWII and Korea/Vietnam era was due to the introduction of processed foods (primarily meats) on the battlefield. We still have much of the same foods today when we are deployed or in the field and don't have access to a DFAC. The difference is nowadays prior to deployment, Soldiers must go through SRP which screens BP and cholsterol. If your BP and cholesterol levels are too high you are declared non-deployable and must see a doctor. The doctor will prescribe beta blockers for BP and/or medication for cholesterol.
Another angle to look at between these mummies and even to a certain extent is modern people with a link to the military as well is the high amount of alcohol consumption and tobacco use. All these are contributing factors as well as bad eating habits.
I have been in the military for more than 20 years and split duties between public relations and food inspection. It's very relevant to the health of the force.
At any rate, I wanted to give you the perspective from someone who has actually worked the issue on the inside and why the author drew the link in there.
jane,
This is the whole idea behind preventative care. Taking a statin after your second MI and bypass is probably a tad too late. Taking it early will help prevent atherosclerosis.
And muscle pain and weakness is exceedingly uncommon
Eric, we'll have to agree to disagree about what constitutes "exceedingly uncommon." As for "taking statins early," I agree that primary prevention trials show a net benefit in middle-aged (mostly 50+) males who can tolerate it. But there are no studies whatsoever in the age group that most soldiers belong to. Healthy 20- or 30-year-olds have such minuscule heart attack rates, whatever their cholesterol level, that virtually no benefit would be seen, much less net benefit. Almost all reputable authorities agree that a young man who is worried about his cholesterol, unless he has a genetic abnormality, should deal with it by diet and exercise. I do not believe that military doctors prescribe statins to a large fraction of active-duty soldiers.
Moreover, this reporter tried to suggest that a drop in noticed atherosclerosis from 77% of Korean War soldiers, to 45% of Vietnam War soldiers, to 9% of Afghan War casualties, was attributable to statins. That first drop should be a big red flag that we are seeing the effects of environmental or lifestyle change, because nobody was taking statins in 1970. From there, attributing the drop from 45% to 9% to statins would require us to assume both near-ubiquitous statin usage and a level of biomarker-based "benefit" (80% reduction in detectable atherosclerosis) that's quite hard to believe.
For what it's worth, I'd bet that the single biggest contributing factor is decreasing use of partially hydrogenated vegetable oils, which were heavily marketed starting in the first half of the twentieth century with no meaningful safety testing, and which can fairly be called poison, since they've been clearly shown to contribute to both heart disease and cancer. Stroke rates have also dropped considerably in the past few decades (something some doctors are slow to acknowledge in risk calculations), which also suggests differences in environmental exposures.
you missed the point. The benefit is not seen until 20 years later
then post numbers. Its less than 1% requiring discontinuation of the drug
thats an obvious first step that goes without saying. But sometimes thats not enough
I honestly don't know. I read the article awhile ago and just responded now
why?
So your study finds how little we really know........ how amazing.....
I'm eating pizza now. :) On a serious note, talk about missing the obvious! One of the big things people in a poor society thousands of years ago (as well as now) would have had in common was stress, which is a big risk factor for atherosclerosis.
Where's the "like" button on this thing. ;)
@ElkMeadow Hahaha! After Reading this Article I'm going to the Gym O__o :)
WHY do we (current humans) always fall into the trap that humans from 3,4, 5k years ago are somehow different from us?? I just don't get it. Hello, people, WE ARE THEM.
This nonsense that we are smarter, faster, better, etc then the people who lived before us is nothing but hogwash.
If we lost all of our technological advantages, and we stripped away modern conveniences....I have a hard time believing MOST people today would be able to make it thru one week w/o getting killed or going hungry! So who's smarter now???
And, yes- the common thing we ALL share is STRESS............. always have, always will. Years ago it was animals eating us causing stress, now, depending where you live (cops eating women???) it might still be the worry of getting eaten, but regardless of the manufacturer; stress is and will always be, our killer!!!
In the old days, people suddenly dropped dead from "old age" in their 60s or 70s, and no one found that unusual. We now know that many of these deaths were from heart disease. People like farmers, who used to do tons of physical labor (no tractors to help) still dropped dead sometimes. So it isn't a shock to find atherosclerosis. The question is whether they died from it at the same age as recent generations or whether something else killed them first. People want and expect to live longer now. Controlling heart disease is essential for longevity.
We are all going to die from something so people should start living and stop worrying so much about how they are going to die.
Cancer was also known to have occurred then. So what? These findings do not negate the benefit of whole food, plant-based nutrition as a way to reduce one's chances of getting heart disease. Modern data is very clear on this.
Modern data is not so clear, recent studies dispute the theories altogether. However there is proof positive that STATIN drugs are the biggest money makers in history! Total BS, soldiers are not on cholesterol drugs, Ha!
I think if you move around a bit, get the ol'blood a circulating (maybe as you eat the pizza) that probably helps!
Arterial blood flow mechanically cleans the inside of your arteries, without blowing a gasket, if you can make that flow more rigorous, it will clean them off better or prevent buildup!
Sorry Dan, but cite one piece of scientific literature that refutes whole food, plant-based diet please. You clearly are not familiar with the work of Dr. Esselstyn at the Cleveland Clinic, Dr. Colin Cambell at Cornell, Dr. Neal Barnard in Washington, DC, Dr. James McDougal, Dr. Joel Furman, Dr. Jay Darji, and the list goes on and on. The cumulative data across multiple nations has shown plant-based is far more beneficial than animal based. So before you try to state something that has your own personal bias, try to do some homework first.
The last sentence says it all. A long winded commercial promoting cholesterol pills. What the drug companies won't do to push their drugs.
I took a statin for several months, until I finally figured out that it was causing debilitating leg pain to the point where I just dreaded standing up, let alone walking. I decided I'd rather risk high cholesterol than be crippled, and a week after quitting the drug, all pain was gone. Other members of my family have told the same story. Funny how the doctor never mentioned that possible side effect, even when I mentioned the severe pain. I discovered by accident that the statin was most likely the culprit.
This article basically says so-called "natural" foods being healthier is a crock.
Pass the butter, the gravy, the salt, and the bacon! Chase it down with a liter of Jolt cola.
Corporations like Monsanto, and the big pharmaceutical industries, all have a vested interest in keeping us from eating natural foods.
Gravy is good.
"suggesting heart disease may not be the fault of modern living"
Actually, the diets of Egyptians -rich or poor- was basically the result of "modern agriculture." Even 4000 years ago, they fertilized the land with the spring floods, plowed the land, planted seed, irrigated it, etc. They had mills to make various kinds of flour. They raised animals for meat, etc. They hunted and fished. They kept bees and sweetened things with honey, etc. They fried things in animal fat. What's so different from us except the portion sizes: paintings of the Last Supper over the last 2000 years show bigger and bigger amounts of food on the table as time goes by! If you want to see something other than modern living, I think you have to go back at least 8,000 years ago and maybe as much as 15,000 years.
I've been to Egypt and been in the tombs of people like Ti, who was a governor 4000 years ago and was buried in a Mastaba (relatively small rectangular tomb) that's about a mile out (10-20 minute walk) into the Sahara Desert from the Step Pyramid of Djoser. Inside the tombs of the rich guys who weren't pharaohs (and they're so cool because they're the ones you have to crawl on your hands and knees with flashlights to get into - the pharaohs' tombs are all electric lighted!) you see images of what their lives were like - directing farmworkers, hunting birds with a boomerang-like weapon, hunting other animals with hunting dogs, etc. You don't see that stuff in the pharaoh's tombs. The farm scenes - except the modern tractors, big silos, etc. - look very much like farms today. And today's farms along the Nile - with all the water and lots of sun - are incredible: corn as high as an elephant's eye would be a stunted plant! When I saw and marveled at them during a Nile Cruise I realized why Egypt is called "The Gift of the Nile" and why it was called "the breadbasket of the Roman Empire."
why haven't they done this before a long time ago? i always thought they where milking the research money.
The number one killer of humans is living, no amount of health insurance is going to change that.
Gee, must have something to do with the fact that they were once living human beings, and all that comes with that...
Wow. And imagine that almost everyone has to work for a living. Mummies had a bad diet - big news. What exactly does this contribute for your salary?
Not a surprise, Egyptians had moved to a neolithic diet based on grains. They tasted good, were cheap and provided lots of empty calories. When you eat grains you are basically eating sugar. The results are obesity, diabetes and heart disease.
As long as people were alive, there has been disease, duh..and they spent how much on this?
Oh what a surprise heart disease is an old age disease. how many millions of taxpayer grant dollars were spent to reach this alleged brilliant conclusion.
I'm amazed at how well the hair was preserved on the mummy in the third picture!
They were known as "the breadeaters". It's the wheat stupid, not the fat.
My husband's been struggling with weight loss for years and largely failing. FWIW, he cut out wheat six weeks ago and has since lost over 20 pounds without, as far as I can tell, going out of his way to behave himself otherwise. And when I think back on it, the times when he was successful for a while in the past were times when he was eating a lot of salads and stir-fries (i.e., not bread and pasta). I do believe there's something to this.
They studied mummies from the Andes to Alaska to Egypt. Pretty much covering the globe, and discounting modern brainwashing that says that heart desiese is caused by diet and lack of exercise.
This of course will not be widely talked about as the diet food industry is so firmly entrenched now and they have gone to great cost and trouble to promote this mindset, along with the whole industry that has grown up around promoting the idea .
The end result? We all die. No getting around it . To try to prevent it man has been willing to go to great lengths to alter lifestyle , demonize anyone over the weight fashion demands, and frankly live a life of deprivation to prevent the inevitable march of time and death.
I have always believed this whole idea was centered around money. Money for research grants, money for products to promote the findings as real. Money to advertise and promote new drugs to prevent it .
They have been very successful in this endeavor, they wont give that up easily.
Until the next so called fountain of youth has been decided upon to promote the idea that we can all be young and live forever comes along to sell that is .
almost...heart disease is ACCELERATED by a poor diet and lack of exercise
To suppose that those individuals who had enough social rank and wealth to be mummified did not eat fatty foods and/or were more sedantary than would today be considered healthy is, to my mind, counterintuitive. We aren't talking about the miserable wretches who were "volunteerd" to build the empire of Egypt, but those folks who wrote the checks. Frankly, the article is patently absurd.
Not only were most Egyptians well fed (Egypt produced a massive excess offood for virtually all of its history), there is no evidence that Egypt had slavery in the same sense as Rome or pre-Civil War America did. While it is true that some individuals were considered to be "owned" by others, those owned individuals had extensive rights and privileges akin to the average peasant.
It is always good to actually read the article before posting , many of these mummies were created naturally , not due to wealth or human intervention.
Evidently, not a single person (aside from aster here) here understood the point of this article. The point is atherosclerosis was equally common among very wealthy, exceptionally well fed societies (Egypt), fishing societies who's members not only got enormous amounts of excercise but also ate what would be considered a relativly healthy modern diet (the Aleutians), and societies whose lifstyle was somewhere in the middle.
Did I miss it, was there any mention of them being obese back then? If so, guess it was all those sugary drinks that NY Mayor is banning.
The human organism is flawed. Our kidneys, hearts, and minds fail usually within 80 years of use... sometimes before. Live your life every day like it's you last... I've been of the belief that it's not how many years you live.. its what you do with the time you have.
Living Americans can't get body scans because the affordable care act says they are too expensive, but we can afford to scan thousand year's dead mummies. In a thousand years from now some hack scientist will then give us our scan.
i want pizza now ._.;
*Like* ;)
I am not sure but the second one looked like Mohammed.
We can't know how many people in these early agricultural civilizations suffered from cardiovascular illnesses or died of heart problems (after all, not everyone who has plaque in their arteries ever does). However, we can compare age-adjusted rates of heart disease and cancer in our society to those of people in other countries in the modern era. These studies show lower rates of degenerative diseases in cultures that do not eat the Western diet and adopt the Western sit-on-your-ass-all-day lifestyle. People in non-Western cultures who adopt the Western diet start to show increasing rates of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer. When individuals from those cultures immigrate to the U.S. and start living like Americans, they start developing those conditions at higher rates.
Because we are mortals and must die of something, if we avoid death from injuries and infections, then something eventually has to go wrong with some organ or system. No doubt it has always been the heart for some people in every culture. However, this provides no evidence that the cause of heart disease is a statin deficiency.
thats an absurd statement. Surely the cause of cancer isn't a chemo deficiency, but we can sometimes cure cancer with it
And the cause of a broken plate isnt a glue deficiency, but that can be used to patch it up
Sure enough, but that's treatment of a disease, and if you actually suffer from heart disease, using statins is treatment (or secondary prevention). Having everyone take statins to try to reduce their risk of someday suffering from heart disease is a less lethal analogue of having everyone take a chemo drug to reduce their risk of someday getting cancer. If the most common cause of heart disease is chronic inflammation, of which high LDL cholesterol may be a symptom, we can do lots of things to reduce inflammation other than popping pills every day of our lives. The drug-pushing in this article, by attributing all population-level improvements in health to drug usage whether that is remotely plausible or not, essentially discourages people from adopting known beneficial, safe, and self-directed actions to improve their risk factors (e.g., avoiding trans fats).
the point is, saying heart disease is not a statin deficiency is ridiculous
these things are not mutually exclusive with taking a statin. Furthermore, what makes inflammation less likely of a primary cause is that more potent anti-inflammatories, like steroids, do nothing to prevent atherosclerotic heart disaese
no it doesnt. Proof?
Yes indeed, some anti-inflammatory drugs actually increase the risk of heart disease (e.g., most NSAIDs). However, some types of LDL cholesterol-lowering drugs also at best do not decrease, and at worst increase, the risk of heart disease. In fact, I am not aware of ANY non-statin cholesterol-lowering drug that has been proven to reduce actual disease endpoints. Perhaps our understanding of the real causes of heart disease is still very limited?
If the rate of a disease (or, as in this case, a mere risk factor for a disease) has dropped sharply over the space of a few decades, and the media tell the public that this is just because we as a nation use more pharma drugs than we did in the past, it will distract attention from the lifestyle and environmental factors that have in fact changed for the better. It will make people think there is no need to think about reducing toxic chemicals in their food or heart disease-inducing pollution in their air - what you eat and breathe doesn't make a big difference, after all, only what pills you take.
There are certain doctors pushing the idea that everyone who lives to middle age should be statinized for the rest of his life. That, I call ridiculous. Being a mortal who has a heart is not equivalent to having heart disease. But even if you write statin scrips for 20-year-olds and they swallow them, if they are that eager to live long enough to get Alzheimer's they'd better also avoid trans fats like the plague.
Exactly. And steroids, one of the most potent anti-inflammatory medicines, do nothing to reduce atherosclerotic heart disease. This shoots a giant hole in your theory
This is false. No LDL lowering drug currently on the market raises heart disease risk that Im aware of. Furthermore, even if true, this does nothing to refute the first point; that anti-inflammatories do not decrease heart disease risk
fibrates.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20535009
So heart disease death rates have dropped dramatically in this country over the past few decades. This is even more astonishing considering that during this span americans have gotten fatter, lazier, and diabetic-er.
http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/about/factbook-06/chapter4.htm
You keep saying the same thing over and over again. This is simply untrue. People who are concerned enough about their health to go to the doc regularly and take a pill every day are not likely to forgo other obvious healthy activities. Its the people who never go to the doctor you need to worry about
But if you disagree, by all means, do what I do and post links to supporting evidence