Clinical Presentations of Teenage Outpatients Encountered by General Internists in Japanese Hospitals: A Cross-Sectional Study

Abstract

IntroductionGeneral internists in Japanese hospitals sometimes consult on adolescents. Our university hospital encounters more adolescents with mental health complaints than other city hospitals. Consequently, based on our experience, we hypothesized that psychiatric disorders are significantly more common among teenagers who visit general internists. Therefore, we retrospectively analyzed the clinical profiles of teenage outpatients who visited general internists at three hospitals to test this hypothesis. MethodsThis study included 342 patients aged 13-19 years who visited the Departments of General Internal Medicine