An examination of millions of patient visits to primary care physicians shows that mental health concerns are second only to musculoskeletal complaints in everyday care. One in nine patients was seeking care primarily because of a mental health concern. "These primary care physicians are the gatekeepers," said study leader Avshalom Caspi, the Edward M.
Arnett Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University. "The primary care physician data allows us to actually see people at their first contact with the health care system." Researchers examined more than 350 million primary care visits for 4.
8 million people from January 2006 to December 2019, as recorded by the Norwegian government. Each visit's principal health concern was coded by the physicians, enabling the researchers to take a deep dive into what these doctors are seeing every day. The study appears in Nature Mental Health .
"The idea was basically to see what parts of the body are they treating," said Caspi, who has co-developed a measure for the pace of a person's aging process. "It turns out that 12% of all the encounters that primary care physicians have are for mental health problems. So of the 350 million encounters, they have over 40 million mental health encounters.
" The data cover 14 years, ending in 2019—pre-pandemic—and reflects a purely Norwegian population with socialized health care. Norway is one of the wealthiest nations on Earth, with effectively zero extreme poverty, and ranks seventh .