Growth Curves of American Children Differ Significantly from CDC Reference Standards

Background: Anthropometric measurements such as weight, height (stature), and body mass index (BMI) provide reliable indicators of children’s growth. The national standards in USA for these measurements are the 2000 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) growth charts, which were generated using data from 1963 to 1994. In this paper, methodologies identical to that of the CDC were used to generate growth charts from more recent datasets. These charts, derived from both publically available and hospital system datasets, provide a glimpse of the current growth of American children. Methods: The datasets were from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) for years 1999 to 2010 and from NorthShore University HealthSystem’s Enterprise Data Warehouse (NS-EDW) for years 2006 to 2012. The weight-for-age, stature-for-age, and BMI-for-age percentile curves and the associated L, M, and S parameters for both boys and girls aged 2-20 years were generated. A free-standing software program to achieve this was also created. Results: The weight and BMI percentile curves generated from NS-EDW and NHANES data differ substantially from the CDC percentile curves, while those for stature do not. The weight and BMI of children at each of the percentiles are significantly higher at all ages compared with the CDC reference standard curves. Conclusion: A software program that generates growth curves of any population of children using the CDC method was developed and successfully applied to two recent datasets. Meaningful comparisons between the growth curves generated from these datasets, and the CDC’s reference curves were provided. These charts provided a visual representation of how dramatically the weight and BMI growth curves of today’s children differ from the CDC’s reference standard curves. © 2018 by World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.