A Quest for the Indian Normal Hand

The story of this issue starts with a WhatsApp group called Hand Surgery Friends here in India. This is a group where cases are put up, advice sought and freely given, and everyone benefits, including those who are not actively discussing a case.

During one such discussion in 2021, there was considerable argument about the size of a certain metacarpal and its intramedullary diameter. Prof. M.V. Reddy, hand surgeon from Hyderabad (Telangana State), started it. I was taken aback by the fact that all the quotes by colleagues in the group were based on data from foreign populations. Nobody could provide Indian data. It then struck me that India ought to have its own normative data on the Hand. In the past, we had studied the dimensions of the lip in infants in Wadia Children's Hospital with Drs. Bharati Khandekar and Shankar Srinivasan and published these normative data in the Indian Journal of Plastic Surgery (IJPS). It is one of our most read and quoted article.[1]

I was the President-Elect of the Indian Society for Surgery of the Hand (ISSH) at the time. The ISSH has a tradition of having a theme for the incoming president for his or her year. I decided that we will do a nationwide project on Indian normative data on hand parameters. I felt it was wrong that a country of 1.4 billion people did not have its own normative data. I, therefore, decided to be the catalyst for the change. My idea was very enthusiastically supported by colleagues from all corners of the country and Prof. Anil Bhat, Head of Hand Surgery at Manipal Academy of Higher Education, agreed to become the convener of the group, for which I thank him. We established an ISSH research committee and Dr. Anil Bhat headed it with distinction.

We had multiple Zoom meetings and Prof. Bhat managed to involve a population geneticist who gave valuable advice about involving populations from all corners of the country to get representative values.

Multiple studies were proposed, and most became multicentric to try and capture ethnic variations within India. The results are here for you to see in these articles, which cover a wide array of data regarding the Indian Hand.

Normative data are immensely helpful for us to evaluate patients and to plan surgery; in my humble opinion, it is also a sign that a country has reached a certain stage of development to attempt such an exercise. I think India is now at that stage. In future when we discuss our data, we will be able to corroborate with Indian normative values rather than some study from a completely different ethnicity.

All the authors and centers deserve my grateful thanks for their hard work and efforts in capturing these data. I thank Prof. Anil Bhat for being a remarkable convener and insisting on correct methodology in data collection. Finally, my thanks to Prof. Dinesh Kadam, Editor in Chief of IJPS, for agreeing to bring out this remarkable special issue of IJPS.

Publication History

Article published online:
27 September 2024

• Reference

• 1 Khandekar B, Srinivasan S, Mokal N, Thatte MR. Anthropometric analysis of lip-nose complex in Indian population. Indian J Plast Surg 2005; 38 (02) 128-131