Height measurements to diagnose short stature and obesity during after-hours period are inefficient.

Background: Pediatricians in Japan usually measure child body weight during medical examinations. However, they rarely measure child height. Furthermore, during examinations at night or on holidays they may not measure child height at all. There are no reports addressing the efficiency of pediatric height measurement during medical examinations, especially those taking place at night or on holidays. Our study asked whether height measurements and obesity index calculations during all pediatric visits were efficient. Methods: We analyzed data collected on patients between the ages of 3 and 10 years who visited a pediatrics department over a 1-month period. We divided the patients into four groups based on when they visited the department: 1) weekday-day, 2) weekday-early night, 3) weekday-late night, 4) holiday-day. The height and the body weight of all patients were measured. This analysis included 1101 patients. The numbers of patients visiting the hospital were 727, 176, 34, and 164 for daytime, early night, late night, and holiday visits, respectively. Resalts: There were no significant differences in ages of children visiting at different times (p=0.57). However, there were significant differences in height variation among children visiting at different times (p=0.008), with the late-night group being the most variable. There were no significant differences in the incidence of obesity (depend on body mass index (BMI)) among patients visiting at different times (p=0.44); however, significant variations were found for BMI among the patients, (p=0.03), being significantly lower for the late night group than the others. Conclusions: We conclude that using height measurement to detect short stature (SS) and calculating BMI to detect obesity is inefficient for children who visit hospital during emergency times.