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Birth weight charts for a Chinese population: an observational study of routine newborn weight data from Chongqing

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posted on 2019-11-13, 14:21 authored by Xue Zhao, Yinyin Xia, Hua Zhang, Philip N Baker, Tom Norris
Background: To construct birth weight charts for the Chongqing municipality, China and to identify whether differences in birth weight exist across urban/rural populations, thereby warranting separate charts.
Methods: Secondary analysis of routinely collected data from 338,454 live infants between 2014 and 2017 in Chongqing municipality. Sex-specific birth weight-for-gestational age centiles were constructed by the lambda-mu-sigma method via the GAMLSS R-based package. This method remodels the skewed birth weight distribution to estimate a normal distribution, allowing any birth weight centile to be generated. A separate set of centiles were created, accounting for urban/rural differences in birth weight.
Results: The centiles performed well across all gestational ages. For example, 2.37% (n = 4176) of males and 2.26% (n = 3656) of females were classified as below the 2nd centile (expected percentage = 2.28%), 49.75% of males (n = 87,756) and 50.73% of females (n = 82,203) were classified as below the 50th centile (expected proportion = 50%) and 97.52% of males (n = 172,021) and 97.48% of females (n = 157,967) were classified as below the 98th centile (expected proportion = 97.72%). The overall estimated centiles of birth weight for rural infants were higher than the centiles for urban infants at the earlier gestational ages (< 37 gestational weeks). However, this trend was reversed in infants born at term.
Conclusion: We have constructed a readily utilizable set of birth weight references from a large representative sample of births in Chongqing. The method used to construct the references allows for the calculation of the exact centile for any infant delivered between 28 and 42 completed weeks, which was not possible with previous charts.

Funding

National Natural Science Foundation of China (project numbers 81571453, 81771607) and the 111 Project

China State Scholarship Fund

History

School

  • Sport, Exercise and Health Sciences

Published in

BMC Pediatrics

Volume

19

Publisher

Springer Nature

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Rights holder

© The Authors

Publisher statement

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

Acceptance date

2019-10-30

Publication date

2019-11-11

Copyright date

2019

eISSN

1471-2431

Language

  • en

Depositor

Dr Tom Norris. Deposit date: 12 November 2019

Article number

426

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