Ahmed Elhakeem is last author on an ART-Health funded paper posted on medRxiv: “Capturing infant and child growth dynamics with P-splines mixed effects models”. This study explains and demonstrates a flexible statistical method called penalized B-splines (P-splines) to better understand how children grow in early life and how this relates to later obesity. In a large Southeast Asian birth cohort, this approach helped identify key growth milestones—such as when BMI peaks in infancy and rebounds in childhood—and showed differences between boys and girls as well as links with prenatal factors. The paper discusses practical considerations, alternative modelling approaches and provides recommendations for research. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.22.25338570v1