The Relative Incidence of Congenital anomalies of the Hand

Baek, Goo Hyun; Chung, Moon Sang; Park, Yong Beom; Yoo, Kwang Hyun

Abstract

There has been a few articles dealing with the incidence of congenital anomalies of the hand in Korea. In this paper, we have analyzed patients who have visited the hand clinic of Seoul National University Children s Hospital from March 1993 to February 1995 to study the relative incidence of congenital anomalies of the hand. We regarded more than two visits of the same patients as one. They were categorized into two groups by our classification system. First group consisted of the patients who showed hand anomaly only. The other group consisted of the patients who had anomalies in the other sites as well as in the hand. The first group was divided into two subgroups; the patients who had single entity of hand anomaly, and those who had more than two entities of hand anomalies. From the clinical analysis based on above criteria, following results were obtained. There were 626 anomalies in 547 patients, 319 (58.3%) males and 228 (41.7%) females (1.4: 1). Unilateral involvements of hand anomaly were noted in 385 (70.3%) patients (229 in right, 156 in left) and bilateral in 162 (29.7%). As a whole, the most common anomaly was trigger thumb (16.5%) and the second was polydactyly (16.1%). Other anomalies, in order of frequency, were syndactyly, camptodactyly, hypoplasia, brachydactyly, cleft hand and so on. In the first group who had hand anomaly only, there were 407 patients who had single entity of hand anomaly. Among these, trigger thumb were 25.3%, and polydactyly 16.2%. There were 68 patients who had multiple entities of anomalies. Among these, the syndactyly was the most common anomaly (23.9%) and the polydactyly was the next (16.2%). Fifty eight (10.6%) patients had anomalies in the hand as well as in the other site. Among these, camptodactyly was the most commonly found (36.5%) and polydactyly was the next common variety (19.0%) in the hand. In the anomalies which occurred in other than hand, arthrogryposis multiplex congenita was the most common (30.0%). Syndactyly of the foot (22.9%) and polydactyly of the foot (18.6%) were the next common anomalies.