A new method for calculation of height centiles for preadolescent children.

A new method of calculation of cross-sectional attained height centiles is proposed. This exploits the variance-stabilizing transformation, which has the form log(a+b height) up to age 11 years. Residuals of transformed height about the expected value for age are antilogged to give a single Gaussian distribution from which centiles can be calculated. In contrast to previous methods the standard errors of the centiles can be estimated without imprecise adjustment for smoothing. The parameters a and b of the transformation do not need precise estimation and the method can be used for population subgroups from which large samples cannot be obtained.