Bigger Babies Being Born in Hong Kong For the past two years, the CUHK Departments of Paediatrics and Obstetrics and Gynaecology have been conducting, jointly with the Hong Kong Neonatal Measurements Working Group, a prospective study to obtain relevant physical measurements from 10,399 singleton Hong Kong newborns delivered at 24 to 42 weeks in nine public and two private hospitals. The measurements include birth weight, body length, and head circumference. The infants were found to be 212 grams heavier and 0.2 to 1.5 cm longer than infants born 15 years ago. Their head, face, limb, skinfold thickness, trunk, and penile length measurements were also taken. This is Asia's first comprehensive set of data on such measurements. They will be very useful for the physical assessment of Chinese newborns with great diagnostic and prognostic importance especially in the field of dysmorphology. The study also investigated the association between certain parental/perinatal factors and physical measurements. The findings show that gestation, sex, parity, maternal age, maternal smoking, duration of antenatal leave, paternal employment status, parental height and weight are all significantly and independently affecting the infants' size at birth.

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