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Updated: Dec 10, 2025

Assessment of Child Anthropometry in a Large Epidemiologic Study
Published on: February 2, 2017
Growth Charts for Tribal, School-Going Children in Jharkhand Using Anthropometry and Lambda-Mu-Sigma Methods to
Dewesh Kumar1, Rana Rishabh Kumar2, Anit Kujur1
1Department of Preventive and Social Medicine, Rajendra Institute of Medical Sciences, Ranchi, Jharkhand, India.
Background:
This study intends to find the growth patterns of selected school children. Globally accepted statistical methods were used to evaluate the data and prepare a growth chart.
Methods:
This cross-sectional study was conducted with school-going children from 16 selected schools of a tribal district in Jharkhand using multistage cluster random sampling. In each selected school, 60 students, 30 boys and 30 girls, were chosen randomly, totaling 960 children (full data was for 935 children only). Growth charts were created using Lambda-Mu-Sigma (LMS) chart maker version 2.5 for height, weight and body mass index (BMI). In the charts, the LMS values with Z scores for each age and respective height and weight for boys and girls were recorded.
Results:
The 468 boys and 467 girls were in the range of 6-14 years of age. Percentile values obtained for the measured heights in centimetres were evaluated and compared with Indian Academy of Pediatrics reference charts for boys and girls for the same age group, and our values were found to be on the lower side. We were able to plot a growth chart of the data set; as the tribal children's ethnicity is different, this growth chart might be used to assess nutritional status.
Conclusion:
We concluded that growth curves for height, weight, and BMI may be used for evaluating children of age 6-14 years in the tribal population. The measures can be a good indicator of their nourishment status and overall growth patterns, which might be indigenous to their ethnicity. A larger sample size of similar tribal populations may give a clearer picture.
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