Mathematical methods in the assessment of human growth

几乎所有的孩子都在成长，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，衡量儿童健康的一个简单而有效的方法是评估他们的体型和随着时间的推移而成长。世界各地的助产士、护士、医生和儿科医生都在使用生长图表，无论是在家里，还是在福利诊所、S外科医生或医院。生长发育在儿科和儿童健康的许多领域都很重要。但生长发育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。这笔赠款旨在通过以下方式发展增长评估科学：改进构建增长评估的统计方法，设计新的图表形式来加强评估，并解决潜在的问题，如：什么是好的增长？？或者？为什么现在的人比上个世纪更高？或者？我的孩子会有多高？？第一个问题的线索来自对婴儿晚年生活的跟踪调查，他们在婴儿期的生长速度与他们后来的健康有关。越来越多的证据表明，过快过早的增长会导致更严重的疾病，原因尚不清楚，但可能与肥胖有关。所以这说明了这一点？好吗？增长不一定是快速的？婴儿的生长和生长图表应该能够测试这一点。然而，尽管它们的名字叫生长图，但它们并不擅长衡量随着时间的推移而增长的情况，相反，它们衡量的是一个孩子的身高--S。这只是图表需要改进的一个领域。另一个领域是儿童肥胖，近年来这已成为一个严重的公共卫生问题。测量肥胖和识别超重或肥胖的方法涉及的统计问题与生长发育的方法相似，最好的答案是以同样的方式解决这些问题。例如，最近关于赠款的工作导致了儿童肥胖症的新定义，该定义正在全球范围内使用。

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.