Shirley, I have no idea what validity this idea has, it turned up in a paper while I was scanning around the web and - unfortunately - I didn't make a note at the time so that I could easily pull up the reference. But what it said was that those veins on the back of your hands may be indicative of whether you might be prone to tn. If they are prominent and particularly squiggly that's a bad sign. Well, my veins are really really prominent and certainly wiggly and I began to verify this by asking all my friends to show me their hands! Sure enough, there's a big difference among individuals, and it isn't necessarily age related. So then I went back and checked a bunch of old photos and found a few that had my hands prominently exposed - wow, there I am, a slender young lovely in a sarong in a little grass hut in Fiji and my hands are like a contour map of veins. So I guess so far as I'm concerned the equation holds: prominent squiggly veins correlates with tn! But of course that means absolutely nothing however much it has amused me to do the checking out. And even if it did mean something, would that just lead to a whole generation of worry warts looking at their hands for years and waiting for lightning to strike? As a silly addendum, I wonder why it's so difficult to draw blood from those veins when they are so easy to see? When my arm was in a cast and they couldn't get at the usual place, and the other arm wouldn't work either (?) I said well just use these big veins. Very reluctantly, that's what the phebotomist finally did but what a hassle, took forever and by the time she was through my hand was so bruised and sore it looked like it had been run over by a bus. I was curious but she was in no mood to explain why it was so much trouble.

Not a very helpful bit of info I'm afraid, but go have some fun with your friends and check out their hands. Nancy