Anthro calculators
A number of resources are available on this website and that of the
Canadian Pediatric Endocrine Group to assist clinicians in calculating Z-scores and centiles for anthropometric data for typically growing children, children with syndromes, and premature infants.
The BCCH Anthropometric Calculators can calculate Z-scores and centiles for height/length, weight, head circumference, body-mass index, waist circumference, waist/height ratio, BMI, blood pressure (2004 NHBLI and 2017 AAP), skinfold thickness, arm circumference, height velocity, target (midparental) height, and predicted adult height for typically growing children and for children with selected syndromes, based on published norms. Please note that for weight-based measures (weight, body-mass index, weight-for-length, weight-for-height, waist circumference and waist-height ratio), values for percentiles <0.1st or >99.9th and Z-scores <–3 or >+3 are not reported, because of the non-normal distribution of weight and waist circumference in children.
These workbooks are free and do not contain macros. They may be used online or downloaded and saved to your hard drive or mobile device.
There are three calculator workbooks:
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Anthropometric Calculator for children 0–19 years of age (current version: 2021/04/06), based on the
World Health Organization (WHO) Growth Charts for Canada (2014 revision). Also contains calculators for waist circumference, waist/height ratio, height velocity, blood pressure (2004 NHLBI and 2017 AAP), target (midparental) height, predicted adult height from bone age, waist circumference and head circumference. Please also note that the
WHO has also made available its free
Anthro and
AnthroPlus software to do these calculations in these two age groups, respectively.
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Anthropometric Calculator for children 0–20 years of age (current version: 2021/02/14), based on the
US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) 2000 growth charts (available online at
http://www.cdc.gov/growthcharts/). Also contains calculators for waist circumference, waist/height ratio, blood pressure (2004 NHLBI and 2017 AAP), height velocity, target (midparental) height, predicted adult height from bone age, waist circumference and head circumference. Please also note that the
CDC has made available a nutrition module in its free
Epi Info™ software to do these calculations.
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Anthropometric Calculator for children with Turner, Noonan, Russell–Silver, Prader–Willi, and Down syndromes (current version: 2021/01/30), based on various published norms (references in workbook).
The calculator for the Canadian Pediatric Endocrine Group (CPEG) growth charts has been incorporated into the WHO calculator, following the development of
consensus growth charts in March 2014.
Please also note that the birthweight-by-gestational age calculator has been retired. Instead, please use the
Fenton Growth Charts for Preterm Infants (2013). There are also online and downloadable calculators and web apps available for these charts.
We also have available
Growth-Z (current version 2020/10/29), a Microsoft® Excel workbook–based program that can do batch calculations for WHO and CDC parameters, as well as 2004 NHLBI and 2017 AAP BP. There is a page in this workbook with instructions for use. Please note that this workbook contains macros, which will have to be enabled for this to work. Please also note that this workbook and the desired anthropometric calculator(s) must be placed in the samer folder on your computer. There are problems reported using this with Macs that we have been unable to resolve.
Our
AnthroCalc app is available on
Google Play and on the
App Store. The
AnthroCalc app calculates centiles and Z-scores for height/length, weight, weight-for-length, body-mass index, waist circumference, head circumference, target (midparental) height, predicted adult height, and height velocity for typically growing children (using WHO or CDC references); for blood pressure (using NIH 2004 or AAP 2017 references); for children with a number of syndromes (Turner, Down, Prader–Willi, Russell–Silver and Noonan); and for preterm infants (Fenton, INTERGROWTH-21st).
There is also an option for those wanting to use these CPEG macros in either a clinical or research context, but who are uncomfortable with a statistical package. The
Canadian Pediatric Endocrine Group has created on-line applications (Zapps™) running these macros on an R server (a/k/a
Shiny), available
here on their website.