Bone status and body fat of healthy newborn Caucasian infants.

Differences in intrauterine growth result in newborn infants who are small, appropriate or large body weight for gestational age1,2. Bone mineral studies in smallfor-gestational-infants have demonstrated decreased bone mineralization when compared to appropriate-size infants3,4. However, there is no study on bone mineral status of large-for-gestational-age-infants. Until the advent of dual X-ray absorptiometry, body composition analyses in pediatric subjects was limited. We therefore studied different-sized newborn infants with gestational ages between 36 and 41 weeks and evaluated both bone and body fat using the dual X-ray method.