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British 1990 growth reference centiles for weight, height, body mass index and head circumference fitted by maximum penalized likelihood
Author(s) -
Cole T. J.,
Freeman J. V.,
Preece M. A.
Publication year - 1998
Publication title -
statistics in medicine
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.996
H-Index - 183
eISSN - 1097-0258
pISSN - 0277-6715
DOI - 10.1002/(sici)1097-0258(19980228)17:4<407::aid-sim742>3.0.co;2-l
Subject(s) - statistics , anthropometry , standard deviation , skewness , kurtosis , mathematics , confidence interval , body mass index , growth curve (statistics) , coefficient of variation , head circumference , percentile , circumference , demography , medicine , birth weight , pregnancy , geometry , pathology , biology , genetics , sociology
To update the British growth reference, anthropometric data for weight, height, body mass index (weight/height) and head circumference from 17 distinct surveys representative of England, Scotland and Wales (37,700 children, age range 23 weeks gestation to 23 years) were analysed by maximum penalized likelihood using the LMS method. This estimates the measurement centiles in terms of three age‐sex‐specific cubic spline curves: the L curve (Box–Cox power to remove skewness), M curve (median) and S curve (coefficient of variation). A two‐stage fitting procedure was developed to model the age trends in median weight and height, and simulation was used to estimate confidence intervals for the fitted centiles. The reference converts measurements to standard deviation scores (SDS) that are very close to Normally distributed – the means, medians and skewness for the four measurements are effectively zero overall, with standard deviations very close to one and only slight evidence of positive kurtosis beyond ±2 SDS. The ability to express anthropometry as SDS greatly simplifies growth assessment. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.