Malaysian growth centiles for children under six years old

Abstract

Background: Growth references are useful for the screening, assessment and monitoring of individual children as well as for evaluating various growth promoting interventions that could possibly affect a child in early life.

Aim: To determine the growth centiles of Malaysian children and to establish contemporary cross-sectional growth reference charts for height and weight from birth to 6 years of age based on a representative sample of children from Malaysia.

Methods: Gender- and age-specific centile curves for height and weight were derived using the Cole’s LMS method. Data for this study were retrieved from Malaysian government health clinics using a two-stage stratified random sampling technique. Assessment of nutritional status was done with the SD scores (Z-scores) of WHO 2006 standards.

Results: Boys were found to be taller and heavier than girls in this study. The median length of Malaysian children was higher than the WHO 2006 standards and CDC 2000 reference. The overall prevalence of stunting and underweight were 8.3% and 9.3%, respectively.

Conclusions: This study presents the first large-scale initiative for local reference charts. The growth reference would enable the growth assessment of a Malaysian child compared to the average growth of children in the country. It is suggested that the use of WHO 2006 Child Growth Standards should be complemented with local reference charts for a more wholesome growth assessment.

• CDC 2000 growth reference
• children
• Cole’s LMS method, growth reference charts
• WHO 2006 Child Growth Standards

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to refer the curves generated from this study as the BAMA Malaysian children reference curves. We are grateful for the approval and permission granted by the Ministry of Health, Malaysia, and the Health Department of all the states which enabled us to retrieve the data. We thanked all the doctors and nurses for providing assistance in the data collection.

Declaration of interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of this article.

We would like to thank University of Malaya for funding this study (a) RG152-11AFR (b) FP002-2011A (c) RP004A-13AFR.

Supplementary material available online

Supplementary Tables I and II