On the Variability of Some Dermatoglyphic "markers" with Clinical Implications

The present study represents a synthesis of the researches of pathological dermatoglyphics developed in the latest years on subjects affected by infantile autism (67 boys and 70 girls), by epilepsy (51 boys and 51 girls), severe cardio-vascular diseases (40 boys and 55 girls) and by ocular diseases, congenitally blind ones included (100 boys and 100 girls), all coming from Moldavia, a region for which reference data of normality (collected from investigations in 100 men and 100 women) are also available. A first observation to be made is that the high degree of somatic, physiological and neuro-psychic degeneration of several of the patients from the four samples is correlated with an increased frequency of the distortions or anomalies with severe clinical implications, whose variability from one group to another is quite limited, for those recorded at digital level, and more extended for the palmary ones. The presence of such pathological "markers" (between 3 and 9 in number in the individual print of the patients), on either one hand or, simultaneously, on both hands (comparatively with their quite rare incidence in the reference sample, and on only one – usually left – hand) led to high percentages, at group level, of the bilateral disposition of such distortions, besides a high rate of their preferential presence on one of the two hands – an aspect suggesting an extended pathological charge of the digital and palmary image in each batch, taken as a whole. The results obtained – the first of this type recorded, as far as we know, at national level, might be further utilized as reference data in the screening procedures of precocious tracing of the 4 affections at populational level, where apparently somato-physically healthy persons may show a high risk of getting ill, as depending, on one side, on the number and pathological significance of the dermatoglyphic distortions, considered, with good reason, as real "malformative stigmas" and, on the other, on their unior bimanual disposition, anomalies which – at the level of collectivity, may sometimes reach close, equal or even higher percentages than those recorded by the author for the 4 maladies.