Lesson 3: Monitoring Growth
3.2 Use of growth charts for postnatal growth monitoring in the NICU
As seen in Lesson 2.2 of Unit 1 of this module, growth charts are used to track fetal growth and postnatal growth. The new prescriptive international standards generated by the Intergrowth 21st Project (Papageorghiou et al. 2014) are likely to substitute body-weight derived curves in monitoring the postnatal growth in the NICU. These standards were developed to describe how fetuses should grow and then being a reliable tool for growth evaluation (Figure 3).
Figure 3.
3rd, 10th, 50th, 90th and 97th smoothed centile curves for fetal growth
Fetal head circumference (A), fetal biparietal diameter (B), fetal occipitofrontal diameter (C), fetal abdominal circumference (D), and fetal femur length (E) measured by ultrasound according to gestational age.
Source: Papageorghiou et al. 2014