[10 years' incidence of positive diagnostic decisions in functional heart disease in acute clinic treatment].

An unexpected low percentage of 0.89 per thousand (43 Patients) with the diagnosis of neurocirculatory asthenia could be documented in a clinical database of 48.114 patients with representative data of diagnostic and therapeutic procedures in West German hospitals. As expected, mean manifestation age in male patients was the age group of 20 to 39 years. Only 4.1% of the neurotic patients were committed to the hospital with this diagnosis. These data document the representative diagnostic behaviour towards neurotic chest pain patients in acute hospitals and probably reveal a serious underestimation of the real prevalence. There is evidence that for these patients the diagnostic strategy is weak and distorted by some systematic bias.