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'Relation of fingerprints and shape of the palm to fetal growth and adult blood pressure' Letter to the British Medical Journal 29/9/93 |
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Dear Alison Tonks, I was interested to read the article 'Relation of fingerprints and shape of the palm to fetal growth and adult blood pressure' (BMJ 14th August 5) but found that there are a number of problems in the dermatoglyphic methodology that put the results of this work into some considerable doubt. Firstly, fingerprint distributions differ between men and women and between different races. Men have more whorls than women, women have more simple arches than men. One basic rule of dermatoglyphic analysis is that one's samples should always be matched for sex and race, something they have omitted to do in this research. Secondly, they have only classified fingerprints into three types of patterns when in fact it is well known that there are (at least) seven main types of fingerprints. Clearly, these kinds of activities will distort their results. Thirdly, they call whorl fingerprint patterns 'abnormal', which is quite preposterous since whorls are the second most common type of fingerprint pattern and occur on some 20-25% of English people's hands! The whorl is especially common on the ring finger - even in the sample of hands that they took 65/139 had a whorl on this finger, almost half the sample. And Japanese and Chinese people have incidences of whorls ranging up to 45-50% of the fingerprints! The untruth of their theory that whorl fingerprints are formed by some accident of blood supply to the right side of the body in the developing foetus is clear, since it does not explain at all such race and sex based differences. In themselves, these facts point rather to a genetic origin for fingerprints, evidence they seem to have ignored. Finally, they have misunderstood and misused the 'ATD' angle measurement. The ATD angle was originally established by LS Penrose as a means of quantifying the location of the T triradius in the palm. It was never intended as a measure of palm size, either by length or breadth! In fact, Penrose found its displaced location as a most important indicator of a genetic predisposition to producing a Down's Syndrome child . This is but one fact from the many years of dermatoglyphic research which have shown that fingerprints have a primarily genetic origin. We should be rather sceptical about the claim that whorls can associated with high blood pressure for the reasons given above. Since they have ignored much of the earlier literature in the field, the results of their researches are at the very least questionable, if not completely doubtful.
(1) Dankmeijer
J 'Anthropological Data on Fingerprints'
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