The sarcophagus of a 3,500-year-old mummy was opened at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
At the intersection of medicine, archaeology, and the plot of an Indiana Jones movie lies a course of study pursued by Jagat Narula, MD, PhD, MACC.
Dr. Narula’s highly eminent day jobs include serving as the Chief of Cardiology at Mount Sinai St. Luke’s and Mount Sinai West; Director of Cardiovascular Imaging for the Mount Sinai Health System; Philip J. and Harriet L. Goodhart Professor of Medicine, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai; and Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of the American College of Cardiology: Cardiovascular Imaging. But for more than six years, he has also traveled the world studying mummies with the Horus Group, named for the Egyptian god of the sky and the hunt. The multidisciplinary research group includes cardiologists, radiologists, pathologists, geneticists, basic scientists, anthropologists, and archaeologists. “We call ourselves the paleocardiologists,” Dr. Narula says, “just talking about the old or ancient stuff.” Their studies, which have been published in journals like The Lancet and Global Heart, began with a simple question: Is heart disease—atherosclerosis, or the hardening and narrowing of the arteries—a disease of the modern age and industrialization?
The group has now studied more than 100 Egyptian mummies in Cairo and Berlin using a CT scanner and has found that a third of them showed vascular disease up to 3,500 years ago. The hardening of the arteries was identified by the calcium that had deposited in their arteries. Now that kind of throws you off, as to why mankind suffered from heart disease so long ago,” Dr. Narula says. “But then you start finding out about their lifestyles. These mummies were from the elite of Egypt. These are the people who used to be carried on palanquins; there was no exercise for them.” They consumed meat frequently and feasted on bird e.gs; agriculture was well developed, and food was available all day, every day. In essence, the Egyptian elite lived like modern humans—though riding in sedan chairs, not SUVs—and their cardiovascular health paid the toll.
Jagat Narula, MD, PhD, MACC
Next the group studied the mummies of 70 Peruvians from the Andes foothills who were buried 1,000 years ago and had been naturally preserved. “You are now looking at folks who are not sedentary like the Egyptians; 50 percent of them are vegetarians, and 50 percent of them consume leaner meat, such as alpaca.” In this hardy population, the team still found that one-fifth had atherosclerosis. At first, Dr. Narula says, the researchers wondered, “Does that mean we are doomed to have this disease?” But they noticed mummies with black lungs that resulted from long exposure to the smoke of cooking fires. The team made similar observations in five sets of mummified remains in the Aleutian Islands. People in that society kayaked, hunted, and ate fish and meat, but they lived in subterranean households that were warmed with fires and had minimal ventilation through the ceiling, so they were exposed to “indoor pollution.” He maintains that atherosclerosis, today or thousands of years ago, is a result of risk factors.
In their next project, in March, the Horus Group will study mummified remains in Torino, Italy. “During the day we work, and in the evenings and mornings we sit down and discuss the data,” Dr. Narula says. “It’s a very congenial group of about 15 people.” But the mission is a serious one. Dr. Narula sees the study of mummies as a “very convincing” way to promote global cardiovascular wellness and the awareness of risk factors, including cholesterol, smoking, hypertension, diabetes, obesity, and stress. “Mummy research shows us that the risk factors remain the basis for heart disease,” Dr. Narula says. But heart disease is not inevitable: “Prevention or taking care of risk factors should take care of disease.”