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The Objective of the present study is to develop the first age- and gender-specific reference curves for waist and hip circumferences in an Asian population of youths. This cross-sectional population survey was conducted in 2003–04 on a nationally representative sample of 21111 school-students living in urban (84.6%) and rural (15.4%) areas of 23 provinces in Iran. After anthropometric measurements, smoothed reference curves for waist and hip circumference (WC, HiC) and waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) were developed by the LMS method. In both genders, WC and HiC percentile values increased with age. For girls, the 50th to 95th percentile curves for WC had a sharp increase between 8 and 13 years and 11–15 years, respectively, and began to plateau after this age, whereas for boys, these curves had a persistent and less sharp increase with age, until the age of 18 years. The WHR curves of girls decreased …