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Assessment of Child Anthropometry in a Large Epidemiologic Study
09:36

Assessment of Child Anthropometry in a Large Epidemiologic Study

Published on: February 2, 2017

A chart to link child centiles of body mass index, weight and height

T J Cole1

  • 1Centre for Paediatric Epidemiology and Biostatistics, Institute of Child Health, London, UK. tim.cole@ich.ucl.ac.uk

European Journal of Clinical Nutrition
|December 21, 2002
PubMed

Insights

Calculating a child's body mass index (BMI) centile from weight and height centiles is highly accurate. This method bypasses direct BMI calculation, offering a simpler way to monitor nutritional status.

Area of Science:

  • Pediatric endocrinology
  • Growth assessment
  • Nutritional epidemiology

Background:

  • Traditional weight-for-height assessment in children lacks statistical validation and differs from body mass index (BMI) centiles.
  • Current methods may not accurately reflect a child's nutritional status compared to BMI.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate weight-for-height indices derived from weight-for-age and height-for-age centiles.
  • To establish the relationship between these indices and BMI centiles in children.

Main Methods:

  • Cross-sectional survey of 40,536 children aged 0-18 years from the 1980 Dutch National Growth Survey.
  • Utilized British 1990 and US CDC 2000 growth references.
  • Analyzed weight and height centiles as standard deviation scores (SDS), comparing direct BMI centiles with the difference between weight and height centiles.

Main Results:

  • BMI centile strongly correlates with weight centile (r=0.77) but weakly with height centile (r=0.1).
  • The difference between weight and height centiles shows weak correlation with weight centile (r=0.3) and strong negative correlation with height centile (r=-0.5).
  • Multiple regression accurately predicts BMI centile from weight and height centiles, explaining 93-97% of the variance.

Conclusions:

  • A child's BMI centile can be accurately calculated from readily available weight and height centiles, simplifying nutritional assessment.
  • This method eliminates the need for direct BMI computation or plotting, aiding in monitoring nutritional status over time.
  • Comparing weight and height centiles directly is an unreliable measure of weight-for-height and should be avoided.
Abstract

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