Scientists have discovered when you become right or left handed
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For a long time people have questioned whether a baby is born left or right handed or whether a dominant hand develops after birth and now a team of Italian scientists may have discovered the answer.
In a study, led by Valentina Parma, a researcher at the International School for Advanced Studies of Trieste, Italy, and Professor Umberto Castiello of the University of Padua in Italy, it’s been found that “hand preference is already well defined at the 18th week of gestation.”
The team analysed 29 pregnant women who were between 18 and 21 weeks into their pregnancies and used 4D ultrasound monitoring to determine their foetus’s hand movements.
Nine years later, the now-grown children were analysed and it was found that in 89 to 100 percent of cases, the children were still using the dominant hand they had displayed during the scans.
This study has proven not only groundbreaking due to the fact that you can now track a child’s hand dominance in the womb (children don’t tend to begin using a dominant hand until they are toddlers) but the team feel these results could help scientists in other areas of medicine.
Hand preference is dictated by the dominance of one of the brain’s hemispheres over the other and the characteristics that occur in either side of the brain have been linked to disorders that involve a “cerebral asymmetry” such as schizophrenia, autism and depression.
The scientists now think that being able to identify the potential dominance of one side of the brain in foetuses could make it easier to intervene earlier to stop or ease the development of certain disorders later in life.
The findings were published in the journal Scientific Reports.
