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NCHS Growth Curves for Children Birth-18 Years
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1977
Year
In the 1970s, national bodies urged the creation of updated growth charts for U.S. children based on contemporary data from the National Center for Health Statistics and other sources, with multiple study groups recommending the use of a single, race‑neutral dataset.
Abstract : In 1974 the National Academy of Sciences' urged that new growth charts for infants and children be prepared using current data for the nutritional assessment of populations of infants and children in the United States. The Academy recommended using the data on growth and development collected over the past decade by the Health Examination Surveys (HES) of the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), supplemented by age-appropriate sets of height and weight data on infants and children from the Fels Research Institute and from an Ohio State University team headed by Dr. George Owen. Earlier (1971), a study group, cosponsored by the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Maternal and Child Health Program, Public Health Service, Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (DHEW), had made similar recommendations. This latter report emphasized the use of such data in the clinical assessment of the growing infant and child, thereby supplementing nutritional screening and other epidemiologic assessments of populations of children. Again, in 1975, a research-oriented study group sponsored by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development made similar recommendations . Furthermore, each of the groups recommended that one set of data for all races would be sufficient for practical purposes, despite the small but actual differences in body measurements noted among racial groupings.