Janet Monge
Atherosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries, has been widely assumed to be a disease of modern times, brought on by modern foods and lifestyles - until now. A recent study of 137 mummies from four regions of the world - including five Ancestral Puebloan mummies from the American Southwest, circa 1500 B.C.E. to 1500 C.E., in the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology collection - revealed clear or probable signs of atherosclerosis in 34 percent of the international group, dated from about 4,000 to 110 years old, with individuals who died between the ages of 2 and 60. The surprising prevalence of the disease among such a large percentage of pre-modern humans raises the distinct possibility that people have long had a more basic predisposition to the life-threatening disease. Such was the conclusion reached by a group of scientists, presenting their paper in the March 10 online edition of the medical journal The Lancet. Janet Monge , associate curator in the Penn Museum's Physical Anthropology Section , and Samantha L. Cox a former Penn undergraduate student, were coauthors on the study, which was led by Randall C. Thompson of Saint Luke's Mid America Heart Institute and the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Medicine. Of the five Penn Museum mummies in the study, one was probable and one was deemed definite for the disease.
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