Scans of Mummies Reveal Clues About Cardiovascular Disease | Brigham and Women's Hospital

The culmination of a collaboration with Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology and an international team of researchers and anthropologists, Brigham faculty and staff performed CT scans on five mummies from 16th-century Greenland in the Shapiro Cardiovascular Center early last year. The team was looking for evidence of plaque in the arteries—also known as atherosclerosis—to see if the leading cause of death in the U.S. today was also prevalent centuries ago. A film crew from National Geographic was also present to capture the findings.

Sure enough, high-resolution scans of the mummified remains—belonging to four young adults and one child from an Inuit community—revealed telltale signs of the disease: hardened calcium deposits in various blood vessels in the chest.