Anxiety in family practice

The time course of patient initiated visits, somatic, functional, and other medical complaints was studied in a group of 58 patients from a family practice who had been diagnosed and treated for anxiety. The findings were contrasted with two other groups of patients from the same practice: 101 depressives and 101 controls. Results indicate that the anxiety patients differed markedly from the depressives in having a very short-lived episode of anxiety or somatic complaints in contrast to depressives' much longer history of somatic and functional complaints which appeared to precede by months the diagnosis of depression. The findings suggest that the anxiety patients in this practice either had a qualitatively different condition from the depressives, or possibly suffered from a short-lived and unrecognized depression.