When detectives dust for fingerprints, they gather clues to solve a crime. Similarly, when Hopkins Bayview researchers fingerprinted a patient, they hoped to detect a particular condition so that they could someday find its cure. In a recent experiment, they uncovered a relationship between the shape of a person's fingerprint and chronic intestinal pseudo-obstruction (CIP), a rare and painful chronic digestive disorder.
CIP causes excruciating abdominal pain, distention, vomiting, nausea, fatigue and severe constipation alternating with bouts of diarrhea. People with this condition cannot retain and digest food, and consequently lose an unhealthy amount of weight and become susceptible to illness. Many rely on intravenous feedings and pain medication to survive.
Dr. Schuster, who recently retired as director of the Division of Digestive Diseases at Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center, and his colleague, T.J. Pulliam, M.D., published the findings of their seven-year fingerprint study in The American Journal of Gastroenterology. They found that 54 percent of their sampling of people with CIP had a rare fingerprint pattern called a digital arch and other conditions generally attributed to this shape. This finding may be useful in identifying potential CIP victims and ultimately determining the genetic factors involved.
Using fingerprints as signposts to various diseases or conditions is not totally new. Previously, researchers discovered links between certain fingerprint patterns and chromosomal abnormalities as well as medical and psychiatric disorders. Dr. Schuster, in an earlier study, discovered a correlation between people with a high frequency of digital arches and early onset constipation and abdominal pain.
In the case of CIP, said Schuster, "the more digital arches there are in the fingerprint, the stronger the correlation (to the condition). The majority of CIP patients possess at least one digital arch. This discovery offers an important clue in diagnosing CIP, and it suggests that the disorder is congenital. It could potentially save people with CIP from multiple needless operations." These fascinating findings do not offer a cure for CIP, but they may aid in early diagnosis and, one day, point the way to a cause and cure.
CIP affects 50,000 people (as many Americans as have AIDS) and emerges primarily in children and young adults. Its cause is unknown and its presence difficult to diagnose. Sometimes CIP comes out of nowhere and attacks otherwise healthy people with no warning. In other instances, it afflicts people as a consequence of cerebral palsy, lupus, paralysis, Parkinson's Disease or a virus. The symptoms of CIP mimic another ailment-- mechanical obstruction. Sometimes a patient will undergo several exploratory operations before the physician changes his or her diagnosis from mechanical obstruction to CIP.
CIP is just one of several digestive diseases called motility disorders. The most common include irritable bowel syndrome (spastic colon), reflux esophagitis (indigestion), constipation, diarrhea and fecal incontinence. Like CIP, other rare conditions, such as gastroparesis (paralysis of the stomach) and intestinal dysmotility, cause excruciating pain and an inability to eat or digest food. A Hopkins Bayview multidisciplinary team of medical professionals is working to increase the pace and the volume of research essential to identifying treatments, causes and cures of digestive diseases. If you have concerns about symptoms of digestive disease, call 410-550-0790.
For more information about the Schuster Center, please call 410-550-7854. Appointments at the Schuster Center for testing and evaluation are scheduled at the request of referring gastroenterologists or internists. Referring physicians should send us a letter summarizing the patients problem history and results of recent pertinent tests performed. Please include patient's phone number and mailing address so that our staff is able to contact the patient directly to schedule an evaluation.
The FactsThe StatisticsMarvin M. Schuster, M.D.
