American and Portuguese archaeologists performing scientific research on a 2,200-year-old ancient Egyptian mummy have diagnosed that the unidentified man was suffering from prostate cancer, Nevine El-Aref reports. The research was carried out on three ancient Egyptian mummies on display at the National Antiquities Museum in Lisbon, Portugal, using state of the art computer tomography (CT) scanners. The images showed that one of these mummies, which scientists called M1, had several small rounded dense bone lesions on the pelvis, spine and proximal limbs. According to similar research published in International Journal of Paleopathology magazine, M1 is the second oldest known case of prostate cancer. The first was diagnosed on a 2,700-year-old skeleton of a Scythian king in Russia. According to a statement issued by the American University in Cairo (AUC), Salima Ikram, a member of the research team and professor of Egyptology at AUC, said cancer was a crucial topic these days because scientists wanted to understand when and how cancer developed in order to know the causes and create a cure for the disease. Ikram said in the statement: "We're starting to see that the causes of cancer seem to be less environmental, more genetic. Living conditions in ancient times were very different; there were no pollutants or modified foods, which leads us to believe that the disease is not necessarily only linked to industrial factors." She thinks the reason more deaths are attributed to cancer today is simply because people are living longer. "Life expectancy in ancient Egyptian societies ranged from 30 to 40 years, which means that those tormented with the disease were probably dying from reasons other than its progression," she argued.
