ANCIENT PROBLEM Heart diseases not a modern ill, mummies show

London: Like 4.6 crore Indians at present, ancient hunter-gatherers also suffered from clogged arteries, revealing that the plaque build-up causing blood clots, heart attacks and strokes is not just a result of fatty diets or couch potato habits. 

    Ground-breaking research announced on Monday in the British medical journal 'The Lancet' after studying 137 mummies from ancient Egypt, Peru, southwest America and the Aleutian Islands in Alaska, spanning 4,000 years of human history has revealed that atherosclerosis or hardening and narrowing of the a rteries – the disease that causes heart attacks and strokes – may have been much more common among ancient peoples than previously thought. 
    CT scans to look for the characteristic signs of atherosclerosis – vascular calcification or build-up of a hard calcified substance along the walls of arteries found that over a third (34%) of the mummies examined showed signs of probable or definite atherosclerosis. 
    Older people were more likely to show signs of the disease which was equally common in mummies identified as male or female. 
    Professor Randall Thompson, of Saint Luke's Heart Institute in Kansas City, said, "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 it is thought to be.