ORLANDO -- Her name was Lady Rai. She was a nursemaid to an Egyptian queen who lived three centuries before the reign of Pharaoh Ramses I. And she suffered from heart disease.
The evidence lies in a CT scan of Lady Rai's mummified remains, researchers here said Tuesday. Using 21st-century science, they peered through her tattered wrappings and into her ancient arteries. There, they found evidence of the same kind of plaque that doctors now diagnose every day.
What's more, they found it in someone who lived 3,500 years before fast food, sedentary living and cheap cigarettes. The research suggests that while modern risk factors may account for the current epidemic of heart disease, the ailment predates them.
"To me, it means we're all susceptible," says researcher Randall Thompson of the Mid America Heart Institute in Kansas City, Mo., who presented the findings at an American Heart Association meeting. "To a certain extent, this may be a disease of being human."
The images of Lady Rai are part of a series made in February by a team of cardiologists, imaging experts, Egyptologists and preservationists at the Museum of Antiquities in Cairo. The team examined 22 mummies, dating from 1981 B.C. to A.D. 364. They found heart tissue or blood vessels in 13; in four, they found intact hearts.
Three of the mummies had atherosclerosis, a buildup of fat, cholesterol and calcium inside their arteries. Another three had probable atherosclerosis. Calcified blockages were more common in mummies who were estimated to have died after the age of 45, researchers say.
The images of Lady Rai betrayed classic evidence of calcified plaque in the aorta, which appears as a bright spot on the CT image. "It's just what you'd see in a living patient," Thompson says. "We don't know whether she died of a heart attack or not, but we can tell that she had the disease process that leads to heart attacks."
The most ancient mummy with evidence of heart disease died between 1530 B.C. and 1570 B.C., the researchers say.
The project got its start when senior author Gregory Thomas of the University of California-Irvine visited the museum with Egyptian cardiologist Adel Allam.
When Allam, a devout Muslim, left the museum briefly to pray, he noticed a CT scanner in a trailer parked out back. The scanner had been used for other research. The idea for the project was born.
The project was funded by the National Bank of Egypt, the Mid America Heart Institute and scanner maker Siemens.
Each of the mummies was slid intact into a donut-shaped, six-slice CT scanner for a sequence of X-rays. "We didn't have to tell them to hold their breath," joked collaborator Samuel Wann of the Wisconsin Heart Hospital.
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