Also, absent fingers may occur as the result of failure of an entire longitudinal portion of the hand and finger to develop. This results in a cleft hand. In some pages, the cleft hand may occur bilaterally and my also involve the feet, with a familial incident caused as the result of dominant genetic inheritance (Figure 73). Such a condition used to go by the name of lobster claw hand. The most common surgical treatment for correction of the cleft hand is to close down the cleft space, and transpose the flap of skin from the closed down space across into the thumb webspace to widen than interspace. Once again, the goal of such a reconstruction is to make the hand more functional for grasping and also of course to improve the appearance.
