Dermatoglyphic studies in the parents of trisomy 21 children I. Distribution of dermatoglyphic discriminants.

A sample of 312 parents of a child with complete trisomy 21 (168 mothers and 144 fathers) has been compared with 295 parents of non-mongol children (61 mothers and 134 fathers) with respect to distribution of individual dermatoglyphic discriminant scores. Selection of dermatoglyphic traits as well a weightings have been based on the discriminant function, constructed for normal controls against cytogenetically diagnosed trisomy 21 mosaics. The results indicate that the proportion of individuals with an increased chance of mosaicism is appreciably greater in a sample of both the mothers and the fathers of mongol children, as compared with the parents of non-mongol children. For D greater than + 3.00, including also the overlap range values, it is, on the average, twice as high as in the control parents, while for the D values greater than + 4.00, strongly indicative of mosaicism, it is about five times higher than in control parents. This is so in spite of the fact that all parents, who had previously been cytogenetically tested and diagnosed as mosaics, were not included in this sample. Although the meaning of these results cannot yet be completely understood, they justify the extension of the use of dermatoglyphic discriminants in studies on parental mosaicism in trisomy 21.