A decade of psychiatric consultation with elderly patients in a Dutch general hospital.

A retrospective case study of ten years of psychiatric consultation with elderly in a Dutch general hospital is presented. The number of psychiatric consultations is increasing more than would be expected from admission rates or demographic changes. Of these, 25.4% were diagnosed as suffering from mood disorder and 34.1% from organic mental disorder. Somatic and psychiatric diagnoses alone seem inadequate to describe the severe problems of this specific group of patients.