OBJECTIVES: The main goals of this retrospective study were to analyse the Prevalence of Gout in GPs offices in Italy and to describe the management of gouty patients by the GPs in terms of types and number of Specialistic visits requests during 12 months of follow-up. METHODS: Data were obtained from CSD LPD, a General Practitioner’s longitudinal database. Patients with at least one diagnosis of Gout from January 2008 to December 2008 have been selected and followed-up for 12 months. RESULTS: From 1.126.847 active patients, 17.241 had at least one diagnosis of gout, resulting on a prevalence of 1.53% in  the general  population. Among the 17.241 patients only 1.42% had received a specialistic visit request related to gout; of these the 42.8% were Reumatology visit requests, the 20.4%  Ortopedics visits, the 8.1%  Nephrology visits. Comparing the group of patients with at least one visit request related to gout (244) to the rest of the patients (16.997) in terms of specialistic visits request (related to all kind of diagnosis) during follow-up period, it could be seen that the group of 244 patients had received in average 4.5 specialistic visits request while the rest of the patients had received  2.3 visit requests. CONCLUSIONS: During the study we have identified a group of  patients (244 patients  1,4%  of the total) with at least one specialistic visit request related to the diagnosis of Gout, and we assumed that this group represents “Complicated patients” , maybe refractory to the therapy, that GPs need to manage in cooperation with specialist physicians. On support of our hypothesis the average number of specialistic visits (related to all kind of diagnosis)  among  this group is significatively higher in comparison with the rest of the patients (4.5 vs 2.3).