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Handedness Fifty Years Later. A Neurological and Methodological Update
Version 1
: Received: 26 February 2024 / Approved: 26 February 2024 / Online: 26 February 2024 (13:23:44 CET)
A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.
Giovagnoli, A.R.; Parisi, A. Fifty Years of Handedness Research: A Neurological and Methodological Update. Brain Sci. 2024, 14, 418. Giovagnoli, A.R.; Parisi, A. Fifty Years of Handedness Research: A Neurological and Methodological Update. Brain Sci. 2024, 14, 418.
Abstract
Handedness reflects functional body and hemispheric lateralization, proving relevant to contextualize cognitive and behavioral profiles. This study aimed to determine the lateralization of the hands, feet and eyes in patients with various neurological disorders and to test the Edinburgh Handedness Inventory (EHI), a widely used handedness measure. The study design included a literature overview and a clinical study. The overview spanned the literature of the past 50 years since the EHI was developed. Three hundred seventy-four patients with immune-mediated (IM) or noIM neurological diseases and healthy subjects underwent personal and family history of handedness, stressful events and IM diseases, and EHI. The literature overview showed that handedness, which develops under the influence of genetic and acquired factors, is an indirect indicator of hemispheric lateralization; hemispheric lateralization is bidirectionally related to the immune system. In the clinical study, the EHI showed appropriate reliability and structural validity; its scores related to chronological age, onset age, and disease duration and helped distinguish patients with IM disease from other patients and healthy subjects. Therefore, handedness may change over the course of life under the influence of pathology and could predict IM neurological diseases. The EHI is an appropriate measure of handedness.
Keywords
Handedness; hand, foot and eye laterality; hemispheric lateralization; immune-mediated diseases; Edinburg Handedness Inventory; literature overview.
Subject
Medicine and Pharmacology, Neuroscience and Neurology
Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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