History of growth charts

Growth charts used by those caring for infants and children have been developed and refined over decades to try and provide accurate centile curves for assessment of growth in terms of weight gain, length/height and head circumference. Large longitudinal cohort studies of healthy babies and children are the gold standard for producing reference data. The biggest and most recent study of term infants, the WHO Multicentre Growth Reference Study (MGRS), was undertaken between 1997 and 2003 to generate new growth curves for assessing the growth and development of infants and young children. It collected longitudinal data on 8500 children from five different countries with differing ethnic and cultural settings around the world from birth to 5 years. The growth curves published in 2006 provided a single international standard based on a healthy breastfed infant as the ‘normative model for growth and development’.

In the UK, data from the WHO study were used to replace existing data for term infants from 2 weeks of age. However, there has been little change in the centile chart for preterm infants as they could not be included in this study. Instead, the original 1990 growth data used to construct the …