Over 4000-Year-Old Mummies Had Atherosclerotic Heart Disease

Well, that’s a wrap. It looks heart disease and stroke aren’t just modern phenomena but instead have been around a long time. Like a really long time. CT scans of 237 adult mummies found evidence of atherosclerosis in 37.6% of them, as described by a recent publication in the European Heart Journal.

And these weren’t mummies from last week, last year or even the last decade, since wrapping up people and making them into mummies after their death isn’t exactly a common thing these days. Instead, these mummies came from earlier cultures that spanned over 4,000 years. We’re talking 161 of the mummies being from ancient Egypt, 54 from the lowland Peruvian farmer–fishermen, three from the highland Andean Bolivian farmer–pastoralists, four from the 19th century Unangan/Aleutian Islander hunter–gatherers, four from the 16th century Greenlandic Inuit hunter–gatherers, five from the ancestral Puebloan and four from the Middle-Ages Gobi Desert pastoralists.

Of the 237 adult mummies that were scanned from 1999 through 2022 as part of the Global HORUS Study, 91 (38.4%) were females, 139 (58.6%) were males, and seven (3%) were of undetermined sex.

Now, life expectancy was much shorter back in the let’s-mummify-the-dead days. In fact, the estimated mean age of death for the mummies in the study was around 40 years of age. This meant that atherosclerosis was probably already present among many of those in their 30s and 40s.

Atherosclerosis is when arteries in your body thicken or harden. This results when plaques consisting of cholesterol, fat, blood cells, calcium, and other substances build up in the inner lining of the artery. Inflammation can contribute to this thickening and hardening as well. Over time, atherosclerosis begins to obstruct the flow of blood through the arteries so that they can’t keep providing blood and oxygen to body parts such as heart muscle and the brain leading to conditions such as heart attacks and strokes, respectively.

The study found that the most common location of atherosclerosis was the aorta, present in 21.5% of the mummies. The second most common location was the ilio-femoral arteries (20.7%), followed by the popliteal-tibial arteries (16%), the carotid arteries (14%), and the coronary arteries (0.4%).

Of course, mummies aren’t exactly the word when it comes to what was actually happening when these people were alive. The mummification process and all that has happened since then could have distorted and changed the vasculature and body tissue in many ways. This could make detecting atherosclerosis via CT scans a whole lot more more difficult. The researchers did state that they were conservative in determining whether a CT finding actually represented the presence of atherosclerosis. So, 37.6% may not have been actual prevalence of atherosclerosis among the people when they were alive. In fact, the prevalence could have been even higher.

Nevertheless, all of this suggests that atherosclerosis and resulting medical conditions like heart disease and stroke are not just the result of modern living conditions and people living longer. Instead, humans may have long had innate predispositions to developing atherosclerosis over time.