Although obesity has become a world epidemic, our understanding of this condition in childhood is limited by a lack of representative data from different countries for their comparison, as well as by the different criteria used to define it. The IOTF has developed charts for an international growth standard that allows the comparison of prevalences across the world. There is evidence that the I...

Suppose that a target function f0 : R → R is monotonic, namely, weakly increasing, and an original estimate f̂ of the target function is available, which is not weakly increasing. Many common estimation methods used in statistics produce such estimates f̂ . We show that these estimates can always be improved with no harm using rearrangement techniques: The rearrangement methods, univariate and mu...

We give methods for the construction of designs for regression models, when the purpose of the investigation is the estimation of the conditional quantile function, and the estimation method is quantile regression. The designs are robust against misspecified response functions, and against unanticipated heteroscedasticity. The methods are illustrated by example, and in a case study in which the...

Growth reference charts are among the most sensitive and valuable tools for assessing the health and development of children. A questionnaire survey was answered by 16 of the 21 ministries of health in the Eastern Mediterranean Region countries (EMR) about their use of growth charts for children under 5 years. Most of the countries (13/16) used the NCHS/WHO charts and weight-for-age was the mos...

Human growth is both a target seeking process regulated by genes and environment, and a highly dynamic process that even under similar social and economic circumstances varies considerably both in amplitude (being short or tall) and tempo (maturing fast or slow). This has led to vivid discussions about which growth chart is the right chart to use. In contrast to wide-spread opinions emphasizing...

Data from a cross-sectional study of 27,826 healthy children in Cairo, Egypt, were used to construct standard growth charts of head circumference and reference values of relative head circumference to length/height for each sex. The sample was collected during the Egyptian Growth Curve Project for children and adolescents in 2002. Values were obtained for each month cohort for children aged 1-2...

The UK 1990 height charts are derived from an up to date dataset and introduce a change in the centile lines, particularly the addition of the 0.4th centile. This study examined the likely impact of these changes. Height data from London school children (1990-1993) were examined using Tanner and Whitehouse (TW) and UK 1990 charts. Numbers of children with height below TW 3rd centile were compar...

Understanding the growth pattern in Marfan syndrome is important for prediction of expected growth, prevention of excessive growth by hormone therapy, timing of surgical epiphysiodesis for cessation of growth, and instituting brace treatment for scoliosis. In this study, we analyze growth patterns and generate growth charts for persons with Marfan syndrome. From the charts of 180 clinically dia...

Patients with Marfan syndrome (MFS) presents with primary skeletal manifestations such as tall stature, chest wall abnormality, and scoliosis. These primary skeletal manifestations affect the growth pattern in MFS. Therefore, it is not appropriate to use normal growth charts to evaluate the growth status of MFS. We aimed to develop disease-specific growth charts for Korean MFS patients and to u...