LCK Low, YW Kwan, MC Tsang, FM Baber, CY Yeung, J Karlberg

Aims Growth faltering in infancy as compared with the WHO standard is common in developing countries and has been attributed to problems with nutrition, infection and infestation, environmental factors, genetic and ethnic differences. This study compare the growth of two longitudinal cohorts of Hong Kong Chinese infants born 25 years apart.

Patients and methods 110 infants born in 1967 (cohort 1) and 50 infants born in 1994 (cohort 2) were included in the study. The patients in cohort 2 are part of an on-going project of growth, nutrition and serum growth factors in early childhood; anthropometric measurements were performed every two months throughout infancy. There was no difference in the gestational age, age of the parents or the maternal height among the two groups, but the paternal height of cohort 2 was significantly taller. The growth of the infants was analysed using the infancy-childhood-puberty model (Karlberg J. 1987).

Results Both the mean height and weight of infants of cohort 1 deviated significantly from the WHO standard from birth to 12 months of age. The mean height of infants of cohort 2 was not different from the WHO standard, but the Chinese infants were found to be heavier in the first 7 months of life. 7.3% of the infants in cohort 1 and 27% of infants in cohort 2 entered the childhood phase of growth by 9 months of age (as compared to 42% in Swedish infants and 2.6% of Pakistani infants born in the slums between 1967-1978).

Conclusion Growth faltering is uncommon in present day Hong Kong Chinese infants. A longer period of follow-up and correlation of growth with nutrition, infection with specific focus in growth factors in our on-going project will hopefully shed light on the interactions of these factors in the control of growth in early childhood.