DOI: 10.36347/sjams.2015.v03i01.060

Pages: 297-305

Clinical Dermatoglyphics is an emerging field of active research with profoung implications, with analysis techniques following descriptive case-control studies. Such studies assess peculiar & significant manifestations among affected individuals relative to healthy controls, attributing these outcomes to gene linkage or developmental instability during prenatal development. This paper critically reviews studies done over a period of 42 years (1972-2014) that have followed such analysis techniques in T2DM, highlighting on strengths & weaknesses. Low sample sizes, negligence of the distinct nature of types & subtypes of DM, negligence of the occurrence of common concurrent disorders having their own impacts on Dermatoglyphics, and a general paucity of studies addressing the relationship between developmental noise measures (Fluctuating Asymmetry) & T2DM are observable limitations that could be attributable to the contradictory findings among the published papers, that need be addressed by future researchers. All in all, inferable positive prdictive values indicative of a predisposition to T2DM have been sumarized, emphasis on the need for further studies from varied populations with larger sample sizes has been proposed inorder to come to conclusive results.