Generating a representative anthropometric dataset for U.S. children and youth

Anthropometric data are widely used in the design of products and environments for children, but the associated publicly available data are sparse and challenging to use. In the United States, the ongoing National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) collects data for both adults and children, including a small number of anthropometric measures. NHANES provides the only available data from which national estimates of U.S. anthropometric variables can be made, but the sampling structure necessitates the use of sample weights to compute estimates. Moreover, a relatively small amount of data is available for children and youth, considering that estimates are often needed for narrow age cohorts. As a result, published estimates are often missing values, particularly in the lower and upper percentiles where many design decisions are made. To address the needs of practitioners, we present and validate a method for synthesizing an unweighted anthropometric dataset for U.S. children and youth ages 2 through 19 years. The method generates continuous models of the distribution of stature, body weight, and body mass index (BMI) by age and sex. Comparison with the published non-parametric quantiles for 2015–2018 shows excellent agreement for all three measures. The resulting synthesized dataset can be used as the foundation for weighting or synthesizing detailed datasets for use in design and provides an avenue for continually updating detailed datasets as NHANES releases new data.