Evidence of atherosclerosis found in 16th-century mummies from Greenland
What secrets lie in the hearts of our ancestors? Signs of cardiovascular disease, for one, as a team of cardiovascular-imaging experts from Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) recently helped discover. Through a collaboration with Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology and an international team of researchers and anthropologists, BWH faculty and staff performed CT scans on five mummies from 16th-century Greenland in the Shapiro Cardiovascular Center early last year. The team was looking for evidence of plaque in the arteries — also known as atherosclerosis — to see if the leading cause of death in the U.S. today was also prevalent centuries ago. Sure enough, high-resolution scans of the mummified remains — belonging to four young adults and one child from an Inuit community — revealed the telltale hardened calcium deposits in various blood vessels in the chest. “It’s always fascinating to look at humans who lived hundreds of years ago and...