Saltatory Growth

How Humans Grow and the Science of Saltation and Stasis

Dr. Lampl discovered that children grow by saltation and stasis, a process characterized by sudden jumps (saltare, in Latin) in size within the course of one day abruptly interrupting days of unchanging size. Her work documented that more than 90% of the time healthy infants and children are not growing at all, a finding detected by measuring babies daily. Getting bigger occurs as bones suddenly elongate and propel babies’ length and children’s height by as much as a centimeter in one day, after not growing for days to weeks in infancy, and weeks to months among children and adolescents. Saltatory growth is a paradigm change in the understanding of normal growth with significant health implications.

For more than a century, scientists assumed that children grow little by little each day, a view that emerges from growth charts constructed to provide general trends in average sizes for age by drawing lines between infrequent measurements. The growth chart image generated the belief that continuous growth is normal and an absence of growth is pathological.  Neither are true.

Many present-day practices are based on the presumption of continuous growth. Dr. Lampl’s research addresses factors influencing when and by how much children grow and the need for new practices.