New Contributions to the Study of the Transverse Palmary Sulcus and of Its Similar Ridge Formations

Finger prints of 684 men and 700 women coming from 7 Moldavian endogamous rural communities have been taken into study, viewed from the perspective of the incidence of the transverse palmary fold (TPF) and of some similar ridge formations. It was observed that the relatively high degree of endogamy of the communities under study is to be correlated with a high frequency of the classical forms of sulcus I and II (10.20%), which is not only sensibly moving off normality (1-3%), but also coming closer to that of the persons with malformed children (14.55%), or even exceeding the value recorded in infantile autism (9.20%) at mentally-handicapped ones (8.60%), in heart’s congenital malformations or other cardio-vasculary diseases (5.35%), at deaf-dumb people (5.45%), in blindness or other severe ocular affections (4.25%) all coming from the same area, which explains the presence already by now of such maladies in the clinical picture of the studied population. The average frequency of the persons having in their palms at least one of the transverse or transversal (special forms) palmary sulcus is in the series under investigation (24.80% of which 27.48% in men and 22.13% in women) over 6 times higher than that generally recorded for Europoid populations, in which it does not exceed 5% in men and 2.5% in women. Sexual dimorphism, as well as the bilateral differences in the distribution of the most frequent forms of TPS I and II, agree fully with those recorded in other Romanian and European reference groups, assuming higher ratios in men comparatively with women and also their presence on the left palms of both male and female subjects.