Birth weight for gestational age centiles for Italian neonates.

ABSTRACT

OBJECTIVE: To provide centiles for birth weight (BW) according to gestational age (GA) and sex for infants born in Italy. METHODS: We used records of the whole neonatal population of Tuscany, a region in Italy, from July 1991 to June 2002 as resulting from the database of the cystic fibrosis neonatal screening program (n=290129). We excluded as unlikely for GA those BW that were more than two interquartile ranges above the 75th centile or below the 25th centile for each GA and gender group. RESULTS: We present the 3rd, 10th, 25th, 50th, 75th, 90th and 97th centiles of BW for GA from the 24th to 43rd week of gestation for male and female Italian neonates, as both tables and smoothed curves. CONCLUSIONS: The large size of the examined population allows us to provide up-to-date, reliable BW for GA centiles for Italian newborns, especially for lower GAs.