Atherosclerosis in Indigenous Tsimane: A Contemporary Perspective

The Horus and other research teams have found that atherosclerosis is not uncommon in ancient people through the study of their mummified remains (Murphy et al., 2003; Allam et al., 2009, 2011; Thompson et al., 2013, 2014). However, some have postulated that traditional hunter-gatherers are in some ways healthier than modern people and that they had very little atherosclerotic disease (O’Keefe et al., 2010). The aim of this study was to evaluate the burden of atherosclerosis in a population alive today but living a traditional lifestyle similar to that experienced by past populations. This led to the Tsimane Health and Life History Project Team (THLHP) (Gurven et al., 2017) and the Horus Study Team combining efforts to evaluate the prevalence and extent of coronary atherosclerosis in the Tsimane of Bolivia (Kaplan et al., 2017)