Ossification communalities of the hand and other body parts: Their implication to skeletal assessment

Correlating the age at appearance of 71 postnatal ossification centers (OC's) with every other OC, 4,970 correlations in all, then grouping correlations by body part, the hand does not exhibit usefully higher communality (mean r ) than the foot, shoulder, hip, elbow or knee. While low communality round bones and ossification sequence polymorphisms together account for the fact that no one body part adequately represents the entire skeleton, it is also true that ossification communality throughout the skeleton is low unless OC's of maximum predictive value are separately employed.