Do general practitioners believe that their older patients physical symptoms are somatized?

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.

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.

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.

GPs consider somatization to be an important cause of physical presentations among older patients, especially among female frequent attenders.