Infant growth and body composition from birth to 24 months: are infants developing the same?
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Date
2024
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Publisher
Springer Nature [academic journals on nature.com] [Commercial Publisher]
Abstract
A good start to life is critical to offset later risks including lower school achievement, reduced adult income, non-communicable disease susceptibility, and intergenerational risk [1]. Growth failure and/or rapid weight gain in early life is also associated with an array of adverse health effects in later life [2–4]. The WHO growth standards have provided better means of interpreting length and weight assessments independent of where the child is born. Along with normative data for foetal growth [5], the child growth standards form part of recent advances in monitoring child development. Normative data for body composition have been described as the next logical level of advancement [6]. The multicenter infant body composition reference study (MIBCRS) has come close to achieving this by developing reference charts for body composition using a multi-ethnic sample, to represent a suitable reference for body composition gain [7]. Data from the MIBCRS emphasise the important role of context [8], home environment and feeding practices [9] in shaping body composition. However, the performance of body composition relative to ideal growth, which is the gold standard for assessing child development in both clinical and epidemiological settings, remains unclear. While anthropometric measurements may provide better reproducibility and are easy to obtain, body composition assessments may provide a more precise picture of the biological response to the interplay of genetic, nutrition, and environmental effects than measures of body size. A better understanding of infant body composition patterns in addition to linear growth may present possible intervention opportunities to reduce the obesity risk in infancy and childhood, and possibly offset the risk of non-communicable disease in adulthood. Therefore, our aim was to investigate longitudinal sex and country differences in infant body composition relative to ideal growth in six countries under conditions that are more likely to facilitate improved linear growth. We hypothesised that children born to mothers selected accordingly to the WHO MGRS [10] will track the WHO growth standards median and have similar FMI and FFMI during infancy irrespective of which country they were born in.
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Keywords
Growth failure, Rapid weight gain, Body composition from birth
Citation
Norris, S.A., Nyati, L.H., Murphy-Alford, A., Lucas, N., Santos, I.S., Costa, C.S., Kuriyan, R., Wickranasinghe, V.P., Ariff, S., Jayasinghe, S. and Kurpad, A.V., 2024. Infant growth and body composition from birth to 24 months: are infants developing the same?. European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, pp.1-11.