Finger & Hands Wrinkled
Finger & Hands Wrinkled
Even If Not In Water
Even If Not In Water
A Symptom Of Lyme Disease
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It is commonly assumed that finger wrinkling is the result of water passing passively into the outer layer of the skin and making it swell up. Lyme patients may experience the finger and hand skin wrinkling without contacting water.
However, although everybody seems to believe that explanation, that is actually quite wrong. Researchers have known since the 30s that skin wrinkling does not occur when there is nerve damage in the fingers indicating that is not a passive process but an active one that is controlled by the nerves.
More recent studies have shown that finger wrinkling is controlled by the sympathetic nervous system, a division of the peripheral nervous system that also controls other involuntary body functions such as breathing or digesting.
First, our hands have to sense the aquatic environment in a distinctive way (we don’t have wrinkling in our arms, for example). The palm of the hand possesses an incredible amount of sweat glands, around 370 per cm2.
Each of those glands has a small duct to reach the surface of the skin and it is believed that when those are underwater, some amount of water can go through the duct and reach the gland inside the hand.
This process is thought to be sensed by the sympathetic nervous system that in turn reacts by reducing blood flow through the vessels of the finger. Now blood vessels have restricted blood, which reduces their volume, and this situation causes the skin to shrink inward, forming the wrinkles we observe after taking a bath.
https://mappingignorance.org/2015/08/10/why-your-nervous-system-wrinkles-your-fingers/
Wrinkling is caused by blood vessels constricting below the skin.
https://www.nature.com/news/science-gets-a-grip-on-wrinkly-fingers-1.12175
Disturbance of sympathetic function is therefore an important early feature of nerve damage.
Last Updated- November 2019
Lucy Barnes
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