Tag: Weight for age

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), over 390 million children and adolescents were overweight in 2022, highlighting the complex interplay of influences on a child's growth. Understanding what factors affect weight for age is essential for parents and healthcare providers to ensure healthy development. This complex health metric is shaped by a wide range of inherited, biological, and environmental variables.

The Gomez scale, one of the earliest systems for classifying malnutrition, was developed in 1956 by doctors in Mexico to assess the nutritional status and correlate it with the mortality risk of children. It is a simple, weight-for-age calculation that categorizes a child's health based on their percentage of the median weight for their age.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), Z-scores are the recommended method for grading undernutrition. This guide explains what the **AZ score in malnutrition**, more accurately known as the anthropometric Z-score, is and how it functions as a standardized tool for assessing nutritional status in children.