Post by cjm on Jun 4, 2017 7:07:12 GMT
The Mummies’ Medical Secrets?They’re Perfectly Preserved
Hundreds of skeletons have lain scattered around a crypt beneath a church in Vilnius, Lithuania, for centuries. But 23 of these remains are unlike the rest: Flesh wraps their bones, clothes cover their skin, and organs still fill their insides.
...
The study of mummified remains in other parts of the world has yielded historical perspective on the spread of deadly diseases and damaging medical conditions, from heart disease in pre-Columbian Americans to various strains of tuberculosis in 19th-century Europeans.
...
One obese man once had arthritis in his spine, pelvis and both knees, a fractured rib on his right side and an enlarged thyroid gland, which might have been caused by goiter. An obese woman had a benign tumor in her lower back. Both had suffered from clogged arteries, a health problem usually associated with modern diets.
...
Historical accounts from Eygpt, China and India had suggested that smallpox had infected humans for thousands of years. But by comparing the 17th century strain with modern variola samples, they found the strains shared a common ancestor that emerged between 1530 and 1654. Their finding suggests that the deadliest kinds of smallpox may have evolved much more recently than previously thought.
...
In 2013 a team led by Dr. Randall C. Thompson, a cardiologist at St. Luke’s Mid America Heart Institute in Kansas City, Mo., performed C.T. scans on 130 mummies from ancient Egypt and pre-Columbian Peru, as well as those of Native Americans in the Southwest and the Unangan people of the Aleutian Islands.
He and his colleagues discovered that more than a third of the mummies had some form of atherosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries, which can lead to heart disease. The affected mummies came from various geographical regions and lived over a span of more than 4,000 years — a reminder that heart troubles have long been prevalent and are not simply the result of modern diets.
“We found that heart disease is older than Moses,” he said. “This disease was present and not hard to find all over the world covering a wide swath of human history.”
...
Using burial markings on the tombs, they identified their oldest case of coronary heart disease in Ahmose-Meritamun, an Egyptian princess who lived from 1550 to 1580 B.C. and was in her 40s when she died. The oldest example of clogged arteries they found belonged to an Egyptian mummy from around 2,000 B.C.
...
Back in Lithuania, Dr. Piombino-Mascali said cases of both atherosclerosis and tuberculosis had been found among mummies in the church crypt. The findings offered evidence that even the upper class in 18th- and 19th-century Vilnius experienced chronic health problems, including those related to poor nutrition.
...
Dr. Mark Pallen, a professor of microbial genomics at the University of Warwick, made similar findings in 2015 while studying tuberculosis in mummies found in a Hungarian crypt with more than 200 bodies.
He and his team had extracted tuberculosis bacteria DNA from the lungs of eight 200-year-old mummies, discovering that ancient people could get multiple strains of the bacteria throughout their lifetimes.
...
Hundreds of skeletons have lain scattered around a crypt beneath a church in Vilnius, Lithuania, for centuries. But 23 of these remains are unlike the rest: Flesh wraps their bones, clothes cover their skin, and organs still fill their insides.
...
The study of mummified remains in other parts of the world has yielded historical perspective on the spread of deadly diseases and damaging medical conditions, from heart disease in pre-Columbian Americans to various strains of tuberculosis in 19th-century Europeans.
...
One obese man once had arthritis in his spine, pelvis and both knees, a fractured rib on his right side and an enlarged thyroid gland, which might have been caused by goiter. An obese woman had a benign tumor in her lower back. Both had suffered from clogged arteries, a health problem usually associated with modern diets.
...
Historical accounts from Eygpt, China and India had suggested that smallpox had infected humans for thousands of years. But by comparing the 17th century strain with modern variola samples, they found the strains shared a common ancestor that emerged between 1530 and 1654. Their finding suggests that the deadliest kinds of smallpox may have evolved much more recently than previously thought.
...
In 2013 a team led by Dr. Randall C. Thompson, a cardiologist at St. Luke’s Mid America Heart Institute in Kansas City, Mo., performed C.T. scans on 130 mummies from ancient Egypt and pre-Columbian Peru, as well as those of Native Americans in the Southwest and the Unangan people of the Aleutian Islands.
He and his colleagues discovered that more than a third of the mummies had some form of atherosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries, which can lead to heart disease. The affected mummies came from various geographical regions and lived over a span of more than 4,000 years — a reminder that heart troubles have long been prevalent and are not simply the result of modern diets.
“We found that heart disease is older than Moses,” he said. “This disease was present and not hard to find all over the world covering a wide swath of human history.”
...
Using burial markings on the tombs, they identified their oldest case of coronary heart disease in Ahmose-Meritamun, an Egyptian princess who lived from 1550 to 1580 B.C. and was in her 40s when she died. The oldest example of clogged arteries they found belonged to an Egyptian mummy from around 2,000 B.C.
...
Back in Lithuania, Dr. Piombino-Mascali said cases of both atherosclerosis and tuberculosis had been found among mummies in the church crypt. The findings offered evidence that even the upper class in 18th- and 19th-century Vilnius experienced chronic health problems, including those related to poor nutrition.
...
Dr. Mark Pallen, a professor of microbial genomics at the University of Warwick, made similar findings in 2015 while studying tuberculosis in mummies found in a Hungarian crypt with more than 200 bodies.
He and his team had extracted tuberculosis bacteria DNA from the lungs of eight 200-year-old mummies, discovering that ancient people could get multiple strains of the bacteria throughout their lifetimes.
...