<i>Promoting Optimal Monitoring of Child Growth in Canada:</i> Using the New WHO Growth Charts
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Growth monitoring and promotion of optimal growth are essential components of primary health care for infants, children and adolescents. Growth monitoring includes serial measurements of weight, length or height for all children, head circumference for infants and toddlers, and interpretation of those measurements relative to the growth of a large sample population of children depicted on a selected growth chart. These measures help to confirm a child's healthy growth and development, or identify early a potential nutritional or health problem. This enables health professionals and parents to initiate action before the child's nutritional status or health are seriously compromised. Over the last three decades there has been substantial discussion on which reference population to use in assessing adequacy of childhood growth. In 2004, Dietitians of Canada, Canadian Paediatric Society, The College of Family Physicians of Canada and Community Health Nurses of Canada published recommendations for use of the 2000 American growth charts from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. At that time, limitations of the charts were noted, including the fact that these charts were growth references, describing how a sample population of children grew, regardless of whether or not their rate of growth was optimal or not. It was also noted that the decision on which growth charts to recommend would be revisited as more appropriate data became available. Increasing evidence that growth patterns of well-fed healthy preschool children from diverse ethnic backgrounds were comparable, supported the use of a single international growth reference based on healthy, wellnourished children from different geographic and genetic origins, who had fully met their growth potential. Until recently, no such growth charts existed. In 2006, the World Health Organization (WHO), in conjunction with the United Nations Children's Fund and others, released new international growth charts depicting the growth of children from birth to age five years, who had been raised in six different countries (Brazil, Ghana, India, Norway, Oman, USA) according to recommended nutritional and health practices, including exclusive breastfeeding for the first four to six months of life. The optimal growth displayed in the WHO growth charts for infants and preschool children represents the prescribed gold standard for children's growth; hence these charts are considered growth standards. In 2007, the WHO also released charts for monitoring the growth of older children and adolescents that had been updated and improved to address the growing epidemic of childhood obesity. Dietitians of Canada, Canadian Paediatric Society, The College of Family Physicians of Canada, and Community Health Nurses of Canada make the following recommendations, intended as a practice guideline for medical practitioners and other health professionals. The desired outcome is that wide dissemination of these recommendations will promote consistent practices in monitoring growth to improve the nutritional status and health outcomes of Canadian infants, children and adolescents.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".