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Updated: Jun 9, 2026
Assessment of Child Anthropometry in a Large Epidemiologic Study
Published on: February 2, 2017
Preterm growth assessment: the latest findings on age correction
Seham Elmrayed1, Susan Dai2, Abhay Lodha2,3,4,5
1Institute of Global Health and Human Ecology, American University in Cairo, Cairo, Egypt. seham.elmrayed@aucegypt.edu.
Objective:
To evaluate the effect of age correction up to 36 months of age for growth assessments of extremely preterm (<28 weeks) and very preterm (28 to <32 weeks) infants.
Study Design:
This longitudinal analysis used data from the Preterm Infant Multicenter Growth Study (2001-2014).
Results:
1,416 children were included (Median gestational age = 27 weeks). Chronological age-based weight, height, and head circumference z-scores were consistently lower than those based on corrected age for all ages (0, 4, 8, 21 and 36 months) by up to -5.2 (95% confidence interval -5.4, -5.1) z-scores for length at term. Using chronological age, higher proportions of children were misclassified as having suboptimal growth (up to 72.9% misdiagnosed as stunted and 89.8% misdiagnosed as underweight at term).
Conclusion:
For extremely and very preterm children, age correction is required for all growth measures through 36 months of corrected age.
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