Maciej Henneberg
University of Zurich, Switzerland
Research Interest
The pubertal spurt is considered a universal trait of the Homo sapiens species. However, observations of growth in the 19th c. and in small traditional societies showed for some children a steady growth without a noticeable pubertal spurt. Widely used growth models covering the entire postnatal ontogeny, such as the Preece-Baines polynomial model 1 or the SITAR model, use a fixed number of parameters to describe growth during puberty, the values of which must be estimated regardless of the shape of an individual's growth curve. In this approach long-term longitudinal data of 110 Polish girls aged 6-18 years were analyzed (1314 height measurements) by fitting polynomial regressions of body height on age and assessing their first and second derivatives as growth velocity and acceleration. This method is free from arbitrary assumptions.