Clinical standards for growth in height of Belgian boys and girls,aged 2 to 18 years

The present paper presents the first clinical standard for growth in height of Belgian boys and girls, based on purely longitudinal data. Growth charts are provided with centiles of height for age along with growth curves of the typical early, average and late maturing child in the population. These new standards show the classical features of cross-sectional standards, but above that, they also provide information about the variability in individual growth patterns, as a result of variation in maturation. Average adult height is 176.6 cm (SD=6.3 cm) in boys and 163.3 cm (SD=5.7 cm) in girls. The representativity of these new standards with respect to the actual Belgian population has been by comparison with recent cross-sectional data, collected on a large number of subjects. These standards should be applied in all situations where interest lies in the evaluation of the normality of a child's growth pattern over some length of time and will therefore find their usefulness in clinical follow-up studies of growth.