How do premature Czech children grow in the first two years of life and how can their growth be assessed in a quality way?

Czech version

Authors: Hana Kosek Krásničanová ¹; Jana Tuková ²; Marie Hladíková ²; Jiří Helmich ²; Daniela Marková ²
Authors‘ workplace: Pediatrická klinika, 2. lékařská fakulta, Univerzita Karlova a Fakultní nemocnice Motol, Praha ¹; Klinika pediatrie a dědičných poruch metabolismu, 1. lékařská fakulta, Univerzita Karlova a Všeobecná fakultní nemocnice v Praze ²
Published in: Čes-slov Pediat 2025; 80 (6): 310-315.
Category: Original Papers
doi: https://doi.org/10.55095/CSPediatrie2025/012

Overview

Kosek Krásničanová H, Tuková J, Hladíková M, Helmich J, Marková D. Jak v prvních dvou letech života rostou předčasně narozené české děti a jak jejich růst kvalitně hodnotit?

Preterm infants are a large specific paediatric subpopulation whose numbers have grown significantly in recent decades. Prematurity is a clinical syndrome of its kind, where a crucial approach is to monitor auxological parameters that are an exact correlate of the well-being of individuals of all pediatric age groups.

Deterioration of auxological parameters is the predominant manifestation of many serious clinical conditions, and detection of growth alterations is thus an essential part of the care of high-risk individuals born prematurely. Routine assessment of auxological status generally benefits more from precise dynamic evaluation of normalized auxological data over time than from „cut-offs“ of centiles (e.g., 3rd line). The ideal tool for this necessary monitoring is using software optimally designed using recent reference data for a given population.

We present representative reference auxological characteristics of Czech boys and girls born before 37th weeks gestational age, created for two weight cohorts for both sexes (birth weight > and ≤ 1500 grams). Baseline auxological data of 1781 boys and girls from 40th to 144th week postmenstrual age (= 2 years corrected age) became the basis of the now freely distributed Nerost software, which provides instantaneous exact and graphical assessment of body length, body weight, weight-length relationship and fronto-occipital circumference.

Keywords:

infants born preterm – growth reference data – infant period – low-birth-weight and very-low-birth-weight infants – LMS method – growth charts – software for auxological data analysis

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