Systematic Growth Monitoring for the Early Detection of Celiac Disease in Children

Abstract

IMPORTANCE Growth-monitoring programs in children aim to achieve the early detection of disorders that affect growth. Celiac disease (CD) is underdiagnosed in the pediatric population in which the presenting features often include faltering linear growth, short stature, or poor weight gain. OBJECTIVES To develop new evidence-based cutoffs for screening for growth disorders and to evaluate the performance of these cutoffs among children with CD measured regularly in a nationwide growth screening program. DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS A longitudinal retrospective study that included longitudinal growth data of healthy children (the reference population) from primary health care and children with CD (the cases) from primary health care and 3 university hospital outpatient clinics in Finland (

At-Risk Screened Children with Celiac Disease are Comparable in Disease Severity and Dietary Adherence to Those Found because of Clinical Suspicion: A Large Cohort Study

“…Poor growth was defined based on abnormalities in expected height and growth velocity as described elsewhere. 23,24 Body mass index was calculated as weight/height 2 (kg/m 2 ).…”

Early Detection, Referral, Investigation, and Diagnosis of Children with Growth Disorders

“…Nevertheless, the study concluded that standard monitoring, even with the high standards of Finnish primary care, was far less efficient than AGM, which has now become the gold standard for growth monitoring. A subsequent study demonstrated the ability of the AGM system to detect coeliac disease based on the height screening rules algorithm [37]. …”

BMI and BMI SDS in childhood: annual increments and conditional change

“…This method does not account for regression to the mean and could, therefore, be biased. More recently, a similar approach was used by Saari et al (2015) to detect weight loss as an early sign of coeliac disease in children. Conditional change in BMI SDS offers an alternative way of evaluating changes in BMI between two time points, provided that the correlation is known, and a matching growth reference to convert the measurements to SD scores is available.…”