This post was authored by ACC President-Elect John Gordon Harold, MD, MACC.

Commonly, we think of atherosclerosis as a consequence of modern lifestyles, mainly because it has increased in developing countries as they become more westernized. However, data released today from the Horus Study of four ancient populations suggests a missing link in our understanding of heart disease, and suggests that we may not be so different from these ancient civilizations.

As physicians we have typically blamed fast food, lack of exercise, smoking and lifestyle factors of modern life for our predisposition to heart disease. But remains from the Unangan (Aleut) Indians of the Aleutian Islands, Peruvian mummies, the ancestral Puebloans of southwest America and mummies from Egypt show atherosclerosis to be a condition that has spanned thousands of years, including a wide variety of geographic locations, genetic backgrounds and lifestyles.

The Horus team performed CT scans of 137 mummies from these four different geographical regions spanning over four thousand years and found signs of atherosclerosis in 35 percent of the mummies and across all populations in the study. Specifically, the team found evidence of atherosclerosis among all groups, including 39 percent of the 77 Egyptians studied, 26 percent of 51 Peruvians, 40 percent of the five Hisatsinom examined, and 60 percent of the five Unangan.

The presence of atherosclerosis, which was regarded as being present if calcified plaque was seen in the wall of an artery or expected course of an artery, suggests the possibility of a more basic predisposition to the disease and that atherosclerosis is an inherent component of human aging with other causes or risk factors that need to be further elucidated.

At the end of the day, while the Horus researchers could not determine the exact cause of death in the bodies examined, symptoms consistent with cardiac chest pain have been described in ancient Egyptian papyrus scrolls. If nothing else, Horus is a wake-up call that we need to look beyond modern risk factors to fully unravel the mysteries of atherosclerotic heart disease.

Photo Caption: Dr. Harold with the Horus trial investigators.

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