Childhood Growth Charts

Growth charts are intended to provide information for evaluating attained size and growth status in the overall clinical assessment. They do not provide the sole clinical diagnostic instrument for this purpose. In practice, however, growth charts often are used as standards to diagnose inadequate growth or overweight or to certify children for participation in federally funded nutrition programs. In developing growth charts, one can take a “descriptive” approach to generate a reference that describes how children grew during a specific time period and in defined locations, or one can take a “prescriptive” approach to generate a reference that describes how children should grow. In this issue, Ogden et al1 describe the 2000 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) growth charts for the United States, which represent a revised and improved version of the 1977 National Center for Health Statistics growth charts.2 For the first time, these charts are almost entirely based on nationally representative samples of infants and children, they virtually eliminate the disjunctions between infant and childhood curves, and they provide a reference for weight relative to height for adolescents. The release of the revised CDC growth charts represents the culmination of a long …