Radiologists underreport the incidence of pediatric obesity, despite an increase in public awareness of obesity and increasing recognition of obesity-related disease, according to a study in the March American Journal of Roentgenology.

Dr. Janet Strife and colleagues at Cincinnati Children's Hospital analyzed more than one million reports from their database spanning 1994 to 2002. The keywords chosen to focus on were obesity, obese, excessive soft tissue(s), heavy, overweight, abnormal body habitus, and excessive fat.

The number of reports containing a keyword ranged from 131 to 456 per year. For each year, documentation of obesity occurred in less than 0.4% of all reports. During that same time, the national prevalence of pediatric obesity ranged from 6% to 16%. An analysis of a subset of records from 1999 and 2000 showed that even if the reports mentioned obesity, it was usually not listed in the diagnostic impression.