Diagnosis: Revealing Palm Lines

• Share

Medical researchers are finding valuable diagnostic clues in what would seem to be an unlikely place—the hollow of an infant's hand. Certain abnormalities in palm lines and fingerprint patterns can alert pediatric cardiologists to the existence of inborn heart defects, including those that develop in the womb, perhaps from a maternal infection such as rubella. Other aberrant patterns may indicate to specialists in the science of dermatoglyphics (literally, "skin carvings") the presence of Down's syndrome (mongolism) and other chromosomal disorders. Now, researchers have discovered that some unusual palm lines signal the possibility of childhood leukemia.

Formed in the Womb. The patterns of fingerprints and the fine lines on the palm are established by the fourth month of life in the womb. The more conspicuous "flexion creases" (the palmist's "heart, head and life lines") are formed a month or two earlier. In normal palms, the heart and head lines are separate and distinct, and neither extends clear across the palm. In many victims of mongolism and of prenatal rubella, however, they are replaced by a single "simian crease," like that on a monkey's palm. At the Children's Medical Research Foundation in Sydney, Australia, Dr. Margaret A. Menser and S. G. Purvis-Smith found another abnormality. In this, an extended head line becomes a simianlike crease, slanting across the palm but leaving a separate heart line. Somewhat chauvinistically, they called it the "Sydney line," although other diagnosticians claim to have observed and described it earlier.

Writing in the British medical weekly Lancet, the investigators describe the palm lines of 100 normal children and how they compare with those of 25 children with acute or chronic leukemia. Thirty-six percent of the leukemic children had either a simian or a Sydney line in one or both palms, as against only 13% of the normals. Victims of genetically determined mongolism are notoriously susceptible to leukemia. Oddly, identical patterns appear in the palms of the mongoloid children and in those of rubella-damaged babies. The reason, according to the Australian researchers, may be that some fetuses are genetically predisposed either to leukemia, or to suffer unusually severe damage from a maternal viral infection. Such damage, they suggest, may manifest itself a few years later as leukemia.