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The relationship between mental illness and physical disease in elderly patients has been the subject of a number of studies, notably those by Kay and Roth (1955) and Roth and Kay (1956). Stenstedt (1952, 1959) reported a high mortality rate among patients with manic-depressive psychosis and involutional melancholia, which he attributed to ‘the high frequency of suicide and to the fact that several patients had died in a mental hospital’. In a survey of elderly people living in the community, Kay and Bergmann (1966) demonstrated a relationship between physical illness and diminished life expectancy on the one hand and functional psychiatric disorders on the other. Shepherd et al. (1964), in a general practice survey in London, found a 'strongly marked association between psychiatric disorder and chronic organic illness'.
Kerr et al. (Sat,) studied this question.