Background: Most birth weight-for-gestation charts are based on hospital populations or on birth certificates. In Flanders, the northem region of Belgium, we have aimed at obtaining standards of birth weight-for-gestation of the total population. The data were collected by the Study Center for Perinatal Epidemiology, that registers 98% of all deliveries.
Subjects: For each hospital delivery in Flanders: gynecologists, midwifes, and pediatricians register 30 items including birth weight and gestational age. We studied the records of all registered single, life-born infants with certain post-menstrual age, free of malformations and born between 1987 to 1995. Percentiles of birth weight-for-gestation were constructed from 24 to 42 weeks of gestation.
Results: The study population consists of 429.070 infants, after exclusion of 113 infants with apparent registration errors. Compared with the Denver standards of birth weight-for-gestation, percentiles were shifted to lower values at early gestational ages, but reached much higher weights at term (p10 = 2960 at 40 w as compared to 2630 g for the Denver standards).
Conclusion: Birth weight-for-gestation standards should rely on recent and preferably population-data. The present standards fit well with those of the UK Northem Region (Tin el al. Brit J Obstet Gynecol, 1997, 104, 180-185), based on a comparable population and a similar registration protocol.
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Devlieger, H., Eeckels, R., Martens, G. et al. Birth Weight-for-Gestation Standards for Flemish Newborns 46. Pediatr Res 42, 392 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1203/00006450-199709000-00066
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1203/00006450-199709000-00066