Analysis of the heights and weights of about 85% of school entrants in Leeds in 1982 and 1983 showed that the distribution at a mean of 5.3 years is similar to the accepted standard centiles and confirms the appropriateness of the use of these standards at this age.

The authors are to be congratulated for a very important contribution with many practical applications. Including covariates in the construction of growth charts will undoubtedly lead to more informative tools for practitioners in many disciplines. Growth charts are widely used in practice to monitor the evolution of particular univariate measurements over time. In some situations, a patient’s ...

Detection and monitoring childhood growth disorders requires the correct use of growth charts. A check on the accuracy of every point plotted on Gairdner-Pearson growth charts of premature infants in a hospital paediatric department was carried out. Errors beyond set limits were recorded. Of 611 points plotted on the growth charts of 50 premature infants who were at least 1 year of age at the t...

OBJECTIVES To reanalyze the between-population variance in height, weight, and body mass index (BMI), and to provide a globally applicable technique for generating synthetic growth reference charts. METHODS Using a baseline set of 196 female and 197 male growth studies published since 1831, common factors of height, weight, and BMI are extracted via Principal Components separately for height,...

I will use the terms “reference centiles” or “centile charts,” as the setting that I consider here is more general than that of “growth charts.” Longitudinal reference centiles over some measure of time (typically age) are almost always implemented repeatedly on the same individual. In this kind of setting the notion of conditional or adaptive centile charts is very appealing, particularly when...