She didn't smoke. Never ate a double bacon cheeseburger. Never sacked out on the couch watching cable TV. Yet by the time she reached her early 40s, she was a candidate for a heart attack.
That was nearly 3,600 years ago.
Princess Ahmose-Meryet-Amon of Egypt's 17th Dynasty had the world's oldest known case of coronary heart disease, researchers say.
Atherosclerosis -- commonly called hardening of the arteries -- was surprisingly widespread in ancient times, at least among the Egyptian mummies examined by an international team of scientists and heart specialists.
Their research, presented recently in New Orleans at the annual meeting of the American College of Cardiology, found that 45 percent of the mummies they put through CT scans had signs of atherosclerosis.
That raises questions about whether hardening of the arteries is the disease of modern civilization that we thought it was.
"We found it so easily and frequently that it appears to have been common in this society," said Randall Thompson, a cardiologist at St. Luke's Hospital in Kansas City.
"It was so common we have to wonder, are we missing something? Maybe we don't understand atherosclerosis as well as we think. Maybe there's a missing risk factor we haven't found yet."