News

Long before there was junk food and TV turned many of us into coach potatoes, the ancient Egyptians apparently suffered from heart disease, too.

A team of Egyptian and American researchers put 20 mummies through a high-tech CT scanner that showed clear evidence of atherosclerosis – or so-called hardening of the arteries, in which fat and calcium deposits build up in blood vessels, potentially leading to heart attacks or strokes. Some of the mummies were 3,500 years old.

“We were surprised,” said Randall Thompson, one of the researchers who presented the findings this week in Orlando at a meeting of the American Heart Association.

“We tend to think of atherosclerosis as being associated with modern risk factors,” said Dr. Thompson, a professor of medicine at the Mid America Heart Institute in Kansas.

“But these people obviously didn't smoke, eat processed foods or trans fats and they most certainly were not sedentary – they had to walk everywhere because there was no motorized transportation.”

Still, the CT scanner showed signs of atherosclerosis in seven of eight mummies deemed to be 45 years of age or older at the time of death, and in two of eight mummies younger than 45. (The other mummies lacked intact blood vessels and hearts.)

“This disease is as old as the pyramids,” Dr. Thompson said.

The mummies, part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Egyptian Antiquities in Cairo, came from the upper echelons of Egyptian society. They were priests, priestesses and members of the royal courts of various pharaohs.

Their diet likely included wild game, ducks, domesticated animals and fish from the Nile, Dr. Thompson said. The fish was probably preserved in salt because of the lack of refrigeration.

Meat and salt have both been linked to the development of heart disease, but the ancient Egyptian diet can't be compared with the food excesses and sedentary lifestyle of our modern age, he noted.

“The disease may be just part of the human condition – at least humans living in civilization,” he said. “So perhaps we can't totally keep the disease from starting.” Even so, Dr. Thompson remains convinced that 21st-century medical knowledge can help keep heart disease in check with various lifestyle changes, medications and surgical procedures.

Drug risks in pregnancy

A shocking study has revealed that a significant number of pregnant women in Quebec have taken prescription medications that are well known for causing harm to a developing fetus. When the women learned of the risks, partway through their pregnancies, a high percentage of them opted for an abortion.

The lead author of the study, Anick Bérard of the University of Montreal, said not enough is being done to alert women to the potential dangers of certain drugs. Although the study was conducted in just one province, she suspects the same problem exists across Canada.

The findings are based on data from the Quebec Pregnancy Registry which included 109,344 women who were pregnant between 1998 and 2002. The researchers found that 6,871 women – or about 6 per cent of the total – took one of 11 medications that can lead to pregnancy problems. Of those women, 47 per cent aborted, 6 per cent had a miscarriage and 8.2 per cent gave birth to a child with a major malformation, according to the results published in the British Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology.

Dr. Bérard says she was especially surprised to see extensive use of isotretinoin among women of child-bearing age. The drug, which is very effective for treating acne, boosts the chances of a major birth defect by 30 per cent. She said that European countries and the United States have better risk-management programs than Canada for dealing with this particular drug.

But she also noted that certain medications can't be easily avoided by those women who suffer from serious illnesses.

“For some conditions, it's a no-win situation. Either the untreated disease is bad or the drug used to treat the disease is bad,” Dr. Bérard said. For instance, some epilepsy medications can cause birth defects. Yet if a woman has a seizure, the fetus can also be put i jeopardy.

In these cases, it's particularly important to plan pregnancies. She added that drug dosages can sometimes be reduced during the first part of the pregnancy. Once the high-risk period has passed, it may be possible to increase the dose.

Unfortunately, she said, half of all pregnancies are unplanned.

Burning issue

Breathing second-hand tobacco smoke is bad for everyone, but it seems to hurt obese adolescents far more than their normal-weight peers, according to the results of a new study.

John Bauer, a researcher at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, noted that previous studies have shown the chemicals in second-hand smoke produce inflammation that can damage blood vessels and lead to heart disease.

Body fat also secretes substances that produce inflammation, Dr. Bauer added. “We think that the two factors – smoke exposure plus obesity – may interact to amplify the degree of inflammation or vascular cell damage that occurs,” he said.

The study findings, presented this week at a meeting of the American Heart Association, revealed that obese teens who regularly inhale second-hand fumes had double the evidence of vascular injury compared with other adolescents exposed to similar levels of smoke.

The additional damage increases their chance of being stricken with heart disease at an early age.