Boston College’s new provost, Cutberto Garza, had a major role in setting the new international standards for growth in children from infancy to age five introduced in April by the World Health Organization (WHO), an agency of the United Nations.

Illustration: Eamonn Bonner

Garza was chairman of the $10 million Multicentre Growth Reference Study (MGRS), involving 300 researchers in six countries, that yielded the new standards. Some 8,500 children were studied in all, from birth to age five,

in Brazil, Ghana, India, Norway, Oman, and the United States (Davis, California, was the American site). The conclusion, according to the WHO report, was that “differences in children’s growth to age five are more influenced by nutrition, feeding practices, environment, and health care than genetics or ethnicity.”

Replacing standards established in 1977, the new benchmarks have a big difference: They make the breast-fed baby the norm. They received the endorsement of the National Childbirth Trust in Great Britain, which noted that “formula fed babies put on weight more rapidly than breast-fed babies after the first few months,” causing “unnecessary concern” among breast-feeding parents. “These new growth standards should help ensure more babies benefit from breast milk for longer,” the trust concluded.

Asked whether infant formula manufacturers might request a parallel set of standards, Garza said, “It would be a difficult position to defend,” and cited the disparity among such products in the world marketplace. Garza directed a WHO working group that studied the old growth standards in the early 1990s. Data collection for the MGRS began in 1997 and concluded in 2003.

Garza, who is known as Bert, became BC’s provost in June after joining the University as academic vice president last November. He was previously a professor of nutritional sciences and vice provost at Cornell University, and he holds an MD from Baylor College of Medicine and a Ph.D. in nutrition and food science from MIT. Now that he is a full-time administrator, he said, “I don’t envision myself ever starting another study of that magnitude.” Garza spent three weeks in Geneva this past spring seeing the WHO report to completion.

Reaction to the standards “has been very good internationally,” Garza said in June. “A number of countries are reviewing them for adoption,” he noted, and the International Pediatric Association has publicly endorsed the norms to its member societies in 141 countries. A statistician’s delight, the standards, with myriad charts and tables, can be found at http://www.who.int/childgrowth/en/.

Michael Molyneux

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