How does a doctor figure out whether a child’s height and weight measurements are “normal”? Whether the child is developing on track? Or whether there are any health problems that are affecting growth?
Typically a doctor uses growth charts to help answer those questions. Now, Children’s Mercy can generate growth charts using the hospital’s databases, which can be another resource for community physicians.
William B. Drake, III, MD, Children’s Mercy Cardiologist and Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Medicine provides the following information regarding new growth chart technology available at Children’s Mercy and how this can be shared with area doctors for enhanced care of their patients.
 Physicians and other health care workers who care for children are familiar with growth charts. They are important models which allow clinicians to make sure children are growing at an expected rate, and monitor and predict height, weight and other measures such as body mass index.
Recent work at Children’s Mercy Hospital allows researchers to quickly create new growth charts from data already present in hospital databases. “This really is a spin-off project, which is part of the overall cardiac center database effort,” according to Drake, adding, “Having our own growth charts means that we understand the normal growth patterns that we see in the population of children here in Kansas City.”
“It’s important to be able to know how big structures are in a child’s heart. We make very important decisions about the best therapies available to children with heart defects based on accurate cardiac growth models. Children’s Mercy has a tremendous amount of data in our cardiac database and it seemed that we should be able to generate our own models for normal cardiac growth,” explains Dr. Drake.
With Children’s Mercy Hospital Institutional Review Board approval, using the hospital’s equipment, technicians, and with the guidance of the hospital biostatistician, Steve Simon PhD, Children’s Mercy has created a technique to quickly and easily generate growth models and growth charts from the cardiac database.
 “The benefit is that this technique will also work for other data besides cardiac data, so the plan is to provide this ability to generate growth models to other specialties,” says Dr. Drake.
Besides cardiac data, the Z Score webpage also has normal models (read growth charts) for Body Mass Index, Height, Weight, Blood Pressure, and Heart Rate, all of which are indexed against body surface area (BSA). BSA is calculated automatically by the web site.
And while the web site has only been in existence for a couple of months, it has already been utilized by other pediatric cardiologists and physicians around the world. Community physicians can also utilize the Cardiac ZScore web site at:
http://www.childrensmercy.org/zscores
According to Dr. Drake, these growth charts will help clinicians to better understand growth patterns both in healthy kids as well as kids with illnesses.
“We have already been able to generate growth charts for our kids with single ventricles,” states Dr. Drake, adding, “There really is no limit to the different populations of kids we can use this tool.”
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