Percentiles of Percentage Body Fat in German Children and Adolescents: An International Comparison

Background: age? and gender?specific percentiles of body massindex in children and adolescents are a cornerstone categorizingoverweight and obesity in youths worldwide. since correspondingworldwide growth curves of percent body fat (% bf) are missing,the purpose was to contribute smoothed percentiles of percentagebody fat from a large urban sample of german youths and toinclude them in actual national and international percentile curves.methods: we estimated % bf in 22 113 german youths aged 3 to18 years participating in yearly cross?sectional surveys of the pepfamily heart study nuremberg between 1993 and 2007. percentagebody fat was calculated from skinfold thickness using slaughterequations. ten smoothed percentile curves were constructed for% bf using the lms method significant.results: the age? and gender?specific reference curves demonstratea continuous age?dependent increase of percentage body fat fromage 3 to 18 years in girls; whereas in boys, the percentile curvessteeply increase from 5 to 11 years and thereafter slightly decrease.the shape of the percentile curves, the maxima among boys atpuberty and the median % bf at age 18 years are consistent withmost of the current growth curves. % bf in urban studies seemsto be lower than in national surveys .conclusions: more than these nine studies should contribute toworldwide-standardized growth charts for % bf to better defineoverweight and obesity in youth.