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Abstract
Objective: To develop current birth wei ght norms by gestational age for singleton , twin and triplet births in Taiwa n.
Methods: Birt h weight data were obtained from ministry of the interior birth registrationsf or over one million live births in Tawan from 1993-1996. Unlikely combinations of birth weight and gestational age were defined by Tukey's boxplot approach within each stratum of multiplicity, gender and gestational age. Birth weight percentiles by gestational age, sex and parity were modeling by polynomial sm oothing technique and LMS method. A loss function then was calculated for comp arison of the goodness-of-fit between 2 models.
Results:
The large database assembled for this analysis provides cu rrent, stable birthweight-gestational age percentiles. Compared with birth wei ght distributions from the 1950s, these current norms are heavier. Compared wi th the birth weight norms for white singleton births in the American populat ion, our norms are lighter. The 2 modeling approaches show their own strength in different ways. We recommend that birth weight norms be updated every 10 ye ars.
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