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. 2014 Aug 15;9(8):e104779.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0104779. eCollection 2014.

Birth weight reference percentiles for Chinese

Li Dai  1 , Changfei Deng  2 , Yanhua Li  3 , Jun Zhu  1 , Yi Mu  2 , Ying Deng  1 , Meng Mao  4 , Yanping Wang  2 , Qi Li  2 , Shuangge Ma  5 , Xiaomei Ma  5 , Yawei Zhang  5
Affiliations

Birth weight reference percentiles for Chinese

Li Dai et al. PLoS One. .

Abstract

Objective: To develop a reference of population-based gestational age-specific birth weight percentiles for contemporary Chinese.

Methods: Birth weight data was collected by the China National Population-based Birth Defects Surveillance System. A total of 1,105,214 live singleton births aged ≥28 weeks of gestation without birth defects during 2006-2010 were included. The lambda-mu-sigma method was utilized to generate percentiles and curves.

Results: Gestational age-specific birth weight percentiles for male and female infants were constructed separately. Significant differences were observed between the current reference and other references developed for Chinese or non-Chinese infants.

Conclusion: There have been moderate increases in birth weight percentiles for Chinese infants of both sexes and most gestational ages since 1980s, suggesting the importance of utilizing an updated national reference for both clinical and research purposes.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1. Flow diagram of records selection process.
Figure 2
Figure 2. Percentile charts for Chinese newborns. P3, P5 to P97 denote the 3rd, 5th to 97th percentile curves, respectively.
Figure 3
Figure 3. Urban-rural variations of the 10th, 50th and 90th birth weight percentiles for Chinese infants irrespective of gender.
Figure 4
Figure 4. Comparison of the 10th birth weight percentiles for boys between the current study, USA, Norway, Kuwait and Brazil.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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