Scientists Can Now Tell If A Child Would Be Left or Right Handed From The Womb
Are you left-handed or right-handed?
Were you born left-handed or right-handed or did you just favour a particular hand after birth?
These questions have popped up every now and then, and the debate has often been on whether babies are born particularly handed, or whether the dominant hand develops after birth.
Well, a group of Italian scientists seem to have found a possible explanation and answer to the ‘hand’ conundrum.
The Research
A researcher, Valentina Parma, at the International School for Advanced Studies of Trieste, Italy, led a research study with a Professor of the University of Padua in Italy, Professor Umberto Castiello, to discover that “hand preference in foetus’ is already well defined at the 18th week of gestation.”
The research team studied 29 pregnant women and analyzed them between 18 and 21 weeks into their pregnancies.
The team then used a 4D ultrasound monitoring to evaluate and ascertain the foetus’s hand movements.
Fetal movements. Frames of ultrasound scans showing the (A) hand to eye, (B) hand to mouth and (C) hand to uterine wall movements. The arrow represents the calibration segment based on the intraocular distance. The white dot represents the digital marker positioned post-hoc. 
Source
After nine years, the children who were now grown were studied and it was discovered that about 89 to 100 percent of the subjects that were earlier studied, were functioning with the dominant hand that they had displayed while at the foetus stage during the 4D monitoring scans.
Normally, children do not commence the use of their dominant hand until they are toddlers, but the study by the Italian researchers has proven to be ground-breaking.
The study has been lauded as grounding breaking, because not only can the research aid the tracking of a child’s dominant hand while in the womb, but the results from the research procedure is seen by the team as a potential model that could aid scientists in various other fields of medicine.
Medical Implications Hand Preference
The preference of a particular hand is medically known to be dictated by the dominance of one of the brain’s hemispheres over the other.
Studies have also shown that the characteristics that feature in either side of the brain can be been linked to disorders such as depression, schizophrenia, and autism; which all revolve around a “cerebral asymmetry”.
In Conclusion
The discovery has led the scientists to believe that being able to identify and analyse the potential dominance of any part of the brain’s hemispheres while a foetus is still in the womb could make it much easier to determine certain disorders early and intervene early enough to stop or ease the development of such disorders later in the life of a child.
Research: Paper
Reference:
Further Reading:
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wow, so we ARE hard wired to begin with .... it is a bit exciting and scary at the same time.
Yes, it seems so @itsok. "Exciting and Scary"......Cool way to put it. Thanks for reading.
Wow..this is incredible. It shows true evolution of science and technology...there are some people who write with both hands too
Yes @seanmalex. There are those who can write with both hands (Ambidexterity), they are also known as "Ambidextrous" individuals. Thanks for reading.