By Dale McFeatters
Scripps Howard News Service

Heart disease has generally been thought to be an affliction associated with modern civilization ― fast food, salt, lack of exercise, smoking and stress.

And it's true that as countries like China and India become increasingly developed, heart disease is increasingly prevalent.

It turns out that the ancient Egyptians, at least those wealthy enough to have their corpses mummified, suffered from it, too.

A group of cardiologists studied CT scans of 22 mummies in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. They found enough heart and artery tissue to analyze in 16 of them and clear evidence of heart disease in nine of them.

One of the mummies with heart disease is 3,500 years old. Two of those with evidence of heart disease were under 45 when they died.

One theory about the incidence of heart disease in Egypt's ancient upper class is that their diets were rich in meat from cattle, ducks and geese that had been heavily salted for preservation.

Even if we can't live like the pharaohs, we apparently eat like them. The ancient Egyptians did have one health advantage over many of today's victims of heart disease: They didn't smoke.

The legendary curse of the mummy, it turns out, may be nothing more sinister than hardening of the arteries.

Dale McFeatters is an editorial writer of Scripps Howard News Service (www.scrippsnews.com).