Mathematical methods in the assessment of human growth

几乎所有的孩子都会成长，健康的孩子成长得很好。这一重要原则将儿科与成人医学区分开来，因此，衡量儿童健康的一种简单有效的方法是评估他们随时间的大小和生长情况。世界各地的助产士、护士、医生和儿科医生都在家里或福利诊所使用生长图表。手术或住院。生长在儿科和儿童健康的许多领域都很重要，但生长评估提出了关于如何构建和使用图表的相当复杂的统计问题。该赠款旨在通过建立在以前的工作，发展增长评估的科学：改善其建设的统计方法，设计新形式的图表，以提高评估，并解决潜在的问题，如？什么是好的成长？还是？为什么现在的人比上个世纪高？还是？我的宝宝会有多高？第一个问题的线索来自于婴儿后期的跟踪调查，他们在婴儿期的生长速度与他们以后的健康有关。越来越多的证据表明，过早地生长过快会导致以后更严重的疾病，其原因尚不清楚，但可能与肥胖有关。所以这说明？好吗？增长不一定？快速？生长，婴儿的生长图表应该能够测试这一点。然而，尽管他们的名字，生长图表并不善于衡量随着时间的推移，而是衡量一个孩子？的大小。这只是图表需要改进的一个方面。另一个领域是儿童肥胖，近年来已成为一个严重的公共卫生问题。测量肥胖的方法，以及识别超重或肥胖的方法，涉及与生长相似的统计问题，并且最好通过以相同的方式处理它们来回答。例如，最近关于补助金的工作导致了一个正在世界范围内使用的儿童肥胖症的新定义。

Nearly all children grow, and healthy children grow well. This important principle distinguishes paediatrics from adult medicine, so that a simple and effective way to measure the health of children is to assess their size and growth over time. Growth charts are used throughout the world for this purpose by midwives, nurses, doctors and paediatricians, either at home, or the welfare clinic, doctor?s surgery or in hospital. Growth is important in many areas of paediatrics and child health.But growth assessment raises quite complex statistical questions about how the charts should be constructed and used. The grant aims to develop the science of growth assessment by building on previous work: improving statistical methods for their construction, devising new forms of chart to sharpen the assessment, and addressing underlying questions such as ?What exactly is good growth??, or ?Why are people taller now than last century?? or ?How tall will my baby be?? A clue to the first question comes from babies followed up into later life, where their growth rate in infancy relates to their later health. There is increasing evidence that growing too fast too early leads to greater illness later, for reasons which are not well understood but which may relate to obesity. So this suggests that ?good? growth is not necessarily ?rapid? growth, and growth charts for babies should be able to test for this. Yet despite their name, growth charts are not good at measuring growth over time, instead they measure a child?s size. This is just one area where the charts need to be improved. Another area is child obesity, which has become a serious public health problem in recent years. Methods for measuring fatness, and for identifying overweight or obesity, involve similar statistical questions to those for growth, and are best answered by approaching them in the same way. For example recent work on the grant has led to a new definition of child obesity which is being used worldwide.