Palmar dermatoglyphics in a sample of Italian population

The purpose of this paper is to provide a descriptive analysis of dermatoglyphic traits of the palm in a North-Italian population. For this purpose we collected and studied the dermatoglyphic prints of 420 subjects (211 males and 209 females) from Bologna. Sexual and bimanual differences were pointed out for several palmar traits, especially with reference to the occurrence of palmar patterns. The trend of palmar traits of our sample was compared to the one of other Italian samples available from literature. The occurrence of modal types of main lines of Italian samples is always within the range of the general variability of Caucasians. The results of our study, in addition to the well-known biological importance of dermatoglyphics as indicative traits of a population, suggest a need for further analysis of palmar dermatoglyphics in Italy by compatible methodologies.