McDonald’s is no longer to blame as the most severe cause for heart disease. Researchers are revealing very interesting facts of 3,500-year-old health state: ancient egyptians were suffering from heart disease.

Dr. Randall Thompson, a cardiologist at the Mid America Heart Institute in Kansas City is sharing his view that fast food , smoking and lack of exercise in our modern life is not the only factor and reason of arteries clog.

With a group of other researchers he used CT scans, a type of X-ray machine, on 22 mummies from Egyptian National Museum of Antiquities in Cairo. The subjects were from 1981 B.C. to 334 A.D. Half of them were over 45 when died and average lifespan of that time period was under 50.

16 mummies were analyzed by heart and blood vessel tissues. Definite or probable hardening of the arteries was seen in nine of them.

“We were struck by the similar appearance of vascular calcification in the mummies and our present-day patients,” said another researcher, Dr. Michael Miyamoto of the University of California at San Diego. “Perhaps the development of atherosclerosis is a part of being human.

It was hard to determine if the real cause of their death was heart attack and what was their exact weight as the mummification dearly dehydrates the body. It was identified though that all of them were of high social status, many served in the court of the Pharaoh or as priests or priestesses.

“Rich people ate meat, and they did salt meat, so maybe they had hypertension (high blood pressure), but that’s speculation,” Thompson said. With modern diets, “we all sort of live in the Pharaoh’s court,” said another of the researchers, Dr. Samuel Wann of the Wisconsin Heart Hospital in Milwaukee.

The oldest mummy with heart disease was Lady Rai, a nursemaid to Queen Ahmose Nefertari who died around 1530 B.C. – 200 years before King Tutankhamun.

The sponsor of the whole investigation were Siemens AG, the National Bank of Egypt and the Mid-America Heart Institute.