The aim of the present study was to analyse first-incidence anxiety in the Lundby Study with regard to course and predictors of outcome between 1947 and 1972. The Lundby concept of anxiety corresponds broadly to that of anxiety disorders in DSM-III-R. The Lundby Study is a prospective, psychiatric study of a geographically defined total population. The present study includes 124 subjects (46 men and 78 women) who between 1947 and 1972 developed anxiety as their first mental illness in life. The median total duration of illness was 1.6 years in men and 1.4 years in women. In both sexes episodes of mild impairment dominated. In total, 54% of the men and 71% of the women were mentally healthy at the follow-up in 1972. A minority of the probands (27%) received psychiatric treatment. They significantly more often suffered from panic disorder with agoraphobia during their first episode, and from comorbidity of other mental illnesses, than did untreated subjects. They also had a significantly longer total duration of illness, a variable with a negative predictive influence on the probability of being mentally healthy in 1972. Men with anxiety showed a 55% increase in alcoholism compared to standard values. They also displayed an increased risk of relapsing into mental illness compared to female cases, a result which, in the light of earlier findings of increased mortality rates, suggests that further investigations of men with anxiety syndromes in the general population are warranted.