Too Obese for a Good X-Ray?:

More and more patients are too obese to get a good picture — a particular concern when the pictures are the radiology kind and the patients are undergoing surgery.

The finding comes from an analysis of radiology reports at Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital. Harvard researcher Raul N. Uppot, MD, and colleagues looked at reports filed between 1989 and 2003. They counted the number of pictures marked “limited due to body habitus” — almost always an indication the images could not be evaluated clearly due to the patient’s size.

Since radiologists can’t get the images needed to diagnose potentially serious problems, these patients incur the cost of extra diagnostic tests — and they may have to settle for substandard care.

It’s a particular problem when very obese patients get obesity surgery. Without the necessary abdominal scans, it’s hard to tell if a bypass operation is healing properly.

“Americans need to know that obesity can hinder their medical care when they enter a hospital,” Uppot said in a news release.

The study appears in the August issue of the journal Radiology.

Reference - WebMD

Technorati Tags: Diagnostic test, Obesity, Radiology, X-ray

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