Growth monitoring: past achievements and future challenges.

Extensive reviews and meeting reports already exist on the subject of growth monitoring and I will draw on these in this review. The aim is to outline the origins and the achievements of growth monitoring over the last 30 years and enumerate many of the successes it has achieved. The constraints that growth monitoring has faced are reviewed together with ways in which these might be tackled. Finally the future challenges and potential of growth monitoring are discussed. (authors)