title: Do general practitioners believe that their older patients physical symptoms are somatized?
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  To establish general practitioner (GP) ratings of the origins of their older patients' physical symptoms, and to test the hypothesis that those older patients rated as somatizing would have similar clinical characteristics to those found in studies of younger attenders.
  
  
  METHODS
  A prospective study among older primary care attenders in two UK practices. All were rated for psychiatric disorder, physical illness, frequency of attendance and demographics. GPs rated degree of somatization on a 5-point scale.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Almost three quarters of attenders were considered to have some psychological component to physical presentations, with 13.3% rated as primarily or entirely psychological. Frequent attendance, female gender and antidepressant prescription were associated with high somatization ratings, but depressive disorder was not.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  GPs consider somatization to be an important cause of physical presentations among older patients, especially among female frequent attenders.
authors.affiliation: Departmentof Psychiatry, Warwick Medical School, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, UK. b.shehann@warwick.ac.uk
authors.forename: Bart
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Sheehan
authors.forename: Christopher
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Bass
authors.forename: Richard
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Briggs
authors.forename: Robin
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Jacoby
mesh_terms: D017677:Age Distribution; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over; D001291:Attitude of Health Personnel; D005260:Female; D006296:Health Services / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D010821:Physicians, Family / Q000523:psychology*; D015995:Prevalence; D011446:Prospective Studies; D017678:Sex Distribution; D013001:Somatoform Disorders / Q000453:epidemiology* / Q000628:therapy*; D006113:United Kingdom / Q000453:epidemiology