WHOcriteria

WHOcriteria refers to the sets of diagnostic, classification, or surveillance criteria issued by the World Health Organization to define health states, diseases, malnutrition, and other health-related outcomes. They are designed to enable consistent diagnosis, reporting, and comparability of data across countries and settings, thereby supporting clinical care, epidemiology, and public health policy.

These criteria are published as guidelines, case definitions, or classification schemes and are periodically reviewed and updated as new evidence emerges. The development process typically involves expert committees, systematic reviews, validation studies, and field testing, with input from member states and stakeholders to ensure international relevance and feasibility.

Common domains include nutrition and growth, infectious diseases, and chronic conditions. For example, obesity and overweight are defined by body mass index thresholds (overweight starting at BMI 25, obesity at BMI 30 for adults). In child health, WHO uses growth standards to define stunting (height-for-age z-score below -2), wasting (weight-for-height z-score below -2), and underweight (weight-for-age z-score below -2), with supplementary criteria for severe malnutrition such as MUAC or WHZ below specific cutoffs.

WHOcriteria are used in clinical practice for diagnosis, in surveillance and reporting for national and international statistics, and in research to ensure comparability across studies. Limitations include the need to balance global applicability with local context, potential lag between new evidence and updates, and reliance on accurate measurement and data quality. The ongoing aim is to provide transparent, evidence-based standards that improve health outcomes and enable international comparison.