Finger-print Patterns in Congenital Heart Disease.

The problem of the etiology of congenital heart disease has lately been attracting increasing attention. Most studies, to date, have dealt with family histories, and the results of these suggest that recessive inheritance may account for a significant number of cases. The demonstration of an association between individual types of congenital heart disease and somatic hereditary traits could be of value both in the ascertainment of the genetic causation of the condition and perhaps in the diagnosis of the anomaly. Dermatoglyphs (finger-prints) are an example of such a somatic hereditary trait; and these prints have recently proved of great interest in the study of chromosome aberrations (Penrose, 1963). This paper reports briefly our preliminary observations of the finger-print patterns from 150 patients with congenital heart disease as compared with those from 50 control subjects: it is planned to report on the palm print subsequently. Although the number of patients so far studied is rather small, some interesting findings have already emerged. In some respects the results are still inconclusive, but they indicate the need for further work in this field.