BMJ 1994;308:1635 (18 June)

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Ultrasound dating and birth weight at term

EDITOR, - Tine Brink Henriksen and Allen Wilcox1 comment on our finding that the birthweight curve in our study was steeper at term than that observed in other studies.2 We ascribed this to our use of dates based on routine ultrasound scans instead of menstrual dates to derive our weight for gestational age standard.2 They suggest that a constitutionally large fetu's gestational age is overestimated by the dating scan and that therefore bigger babies, with presumably larger birth weights at term, would selectively be plotted against later gestations, thus creating bias.

While it is true that the study they refer to showed variation in biparietal diameter between small (<=10th centile) and large (>=90th centile) babies,3 the difference between these extremes amounted to only about 1.5 mm at 18 weeks (figure 2 in reference 3). This difference is equivalent to less than one day's variation in gestational age 4 and would translate . . . [Full text of this article]


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