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Handwriting a window to your heart?

handwriting analysis The early signs of heart disease may show up in your handwriting, says one researcher, an idea others have likened to palm reading.

Findings of study carried out at the UK's Poole Hospital were presented at a recent International Graphonomics Society conference in Melbourne.

Handwriting researcher Christina Strang reported she had analysed the handwriting of over 100 people in their early 60s, including 61 patients at the hospital's cardiac clinic.

She also analysed the writing of 41 people who had not been diagnosed with cardiac disease.

Strang says previous studies have focused on the effect on writing of neurological conditions such as Parkinson's, Huntington's and Alzheimer's diseases.

But she wanted to see if cardiac disease could also leave its mark.

Strang analysed magnified samples of writing for various features including breaks in the writing, malformed 'o's and resting dots, where the pen rests momentarily in the middle of a pen stroke.

She found that people in the cardiac clinic group had a statistically significant higher number of resting dots than the control group, especially in the upper middle zone of the letters 'a', 'e' and 'o'.

Strang says she has submitted the findings for publication and attempts to replicate the findings are now under way.

She says much research in this area has been very unscientific and she is attempting to bring some rigour to it.

Credibility gap

But some researchers think the paper has little hope of being published in a clinical journal.

"I am afraid it does not pass the credibility test," says neuropsychiatrist Professor Perminder Sachdev of the University of New South Wales, who viewed Strang's paper.

He says there are problems with the way study participants were selected and studied.

Sachdev also wonders what possible mechanisms there could be to link handwriting with heart disease and criticises Strang for failing to offer any interpretation of her findings.

"Is it that the patients are more tired and therefore pause a lot while writing?" he says.

Dr Karen Stollznow of the Australian Skeptics says Strang appears to be a proponent of the "pseudoscience" of "graphology".

"Graphology is the handwriting equivalent of palm reading," says Stollznow, who is based in the US.

Graphonomy or graphology?

She says while there are scientific approaches to handwriting analysis, which should be referred to as graphonomy, the two terms are often confused and the terms used interchangeably.

"Handwriting production might be affected by some disorders (eg Parkinson's disease) but this is not to say that handwriting style can be an indicator of disease, and specifically heart disease," says Stollznow.

"Simply, there isn't any evidence to correlate heart disease with handwriting style, or to suggest that handwriting style can be used to accurately diagnose illness."

Strang now plans to collaborate with Dr Andrew McLeod, the senior cardiac consultant at Poole Hospital, to test a much larger group of diagnosed heart disease patients.

She says while McLeod was initially sceptical that non-neurological conditions could leave their mark in handwriting, he was impressed by the preliminary findings.

Strang hopes one day handwriting analysis can predict the early stage of heart disease without the need for invasive and expensive techniques.

Writing while drunk

Australian researchers meanwhile have been studying the impact of alcohol intoxication on handwriting.

Dr Jim Phillips of Monash University and colleagues studied the impact of three to five standard drinks of vodka and orange on the handwriting of 20 men in their 20s.

"Their handwriting got larger," says Phillips.

His team found that having a blood alcohol reading of about 0.05% changed the speed at which pen strokes began and ended.

"The acceleration phase seemed to be longer and the deceleration phase seemed to be shorter," says Phillips.

While the finding that a few drinks causes problems with your fine-motor skills may not be surprising, Phillips there is very little research on the impact of alcohol on handwriting.

He says the findings may assist in forensic investigations, trying to determine whether someone was under the influence when, for example, signing a document.