14 DAY TRIAL // When you first think about it, being ambidextrous – as in able to use both of your hands with the same ease – may seem like an advantage. But a recent scientific study has demonstrated that children with this ability apparently suffer from a host of conditions, such as being exposed to a higher risk of developing mental health, language and academic problems at school, as opposed to their peers. The new conclusions could in the near future be used by healthcare personnel to assess which of our children are more at risk of developing such conditions, and provide counseling or help, if needed.
The investigation focused on only a small batch of test subjects, but for a very specific reason. Being ambidextrous is a fairly rare occurrence, which gets transmitted to about 1 in every 100 children. “But our results are statistically and clinically significant. That said, our results should not be taken to mean that all children who are mixed-handed will have problems at school or develop ADHD. We found that mixed-handed children and adolescents were at a higher risk of having certain problems, but we'd like to stress that most of the mixed-handed children we followed didn't have any of these difficulties,” says Imperial College London (ICL) expert Alina Rodriguez, the leader of the research.
The study was conducted in Northern Finland, on more than 8,000 children. The population sample featured 87 individuals that were ambidextrous, as well as a number of left-handed children. Because right-handed persons are the norm, both the left-handed and the mixed-handed groups were compared to the majority. The ambidextrous children completed a variety of questionnaires, two at the ages of 7 and 8, and another pair when they were 15 and 16, respectively.
“Handedness is seen as a proxy for how the brain is functioning, and it's not a perfect measurement. A more accurate method would be to use MRI [magnetic resonance imaging] scanning, but this isn't possible in a large-scale study. All we can say from this is that they have an atypical brain lateralization; that just means the brain circuitry and function is likely to differ from the normal pattern,” which is most commonly encountered in left-handed individuals, the expert adds for LiveScience.
“There is no reason to believe that American children would behave in any other way as the children in this study,” Rodriguez concludes. Details of the work appear in the latest issue of the respected scientific journal Pediatrics.