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Birthweight curves for newborns of Asian ancestry

Canadian data suggest that infants born to parents of Asian ancestry may be of lower birth weight than those of White European decent. Using traditional newborn birthweight curves, some Canadian newborns of East Asian and South Asian ancestry may be misclassified as small for gestational age birthweight (SGA), while they are actually normal in birthweight if compared to other East Asian and South Asian infants.

We developed ethnicity-specific birth weight curves for male and female infants born to mothers from East Asia and South Asia. We included liveborn infants of 1565 women born in East Asia and 753 women born in South Asia, all of whom delivered at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto, Ontario. We generated smoothed birth weight curves for male and female newborns.

These curves are preliminary in nature: they were derived in a single Canadian hospital. They may not apply to all newborns of East Asian and South Asian ancestry.

Smoothed birth weight centile curves for:

 

Joel G. Ray, MD MSc
Departments of Medicine, and Obstetrics and Gynecology
rayj@smh.toronto.on.ca

Depeng Jiang, PhD
Applied Health Research Centre, Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute

Michael Sgro MD
Department of Pediatrics

Rajiv Shah, MD MSc
Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology

Gita Singh, MD MSc
Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology

Muhammad M. Mamdani, PharmD, MA, MPH
Applied Health Research Centre, Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute

St. Michael's Hospital University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario