Auxology - an update 2025

Growth is a dynamic process and a mirror of health. Documenting child and adolescent growth includes careful, and if possible, longitudinal recordings of height, weight, and indicators of the state of maturity. Measurements should be translated into centiles or z-scores. Changes in height z-scores are related to the progress in maturation, and sensitive to growth arrests and catch-up growth. Heritability studies and genome-wide association studies have traditionally been applied to assess the intrinsic regulators of growth. Nutritional, environmental and socio-economic factors are usually considered the major extrinsic regulators of growth. Human growth is not a target seeking process, but a process that unfolds within a frame shaped and regulated primarily by the social community of family, peers, and neighbors. Community effects on height protect against being "too tall" or "too short" within a given social group. In the healthy individual, height is a social signal which is strongly conserved in evolution. Height refers to social status among members of the same group, and is strategically regulated through neuroendocrine signals. Strategic adjustments of growth are part of social interactions. Being taller signals supremacy and dominance, being shorter signals inferiority. Global growth charts are insufficient to reflect the social and historic plasticity of human growth, and can lead to misclassification of "normal" and "abnormal" growth within a given population.