Cognition, hallucination severity and hallucination-specific insight in neurodegenerative disorders and eye disease.

Research overview

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Introduction: Hallucinations occur across neurodegenerative disorders, with increasing severity, poorer cognition and impaired hallucination-specific insight associated with worse outcomes and faster disease progression. It remains unclear how changes in cognition, temporal aspects of hallucinations, hallucination-specific insight and distress relate to each other.Methods: Extant samples of patients experiencing visual hallucinations were included in the analyses: Parkinson's Disease (n = 103), Parkinson's Disease Dementia (n = 41), Dementia with Lewy Bodies (n = 27) and Eye Disease (n = 113). We explored the relationship between factors of interest with Spearman's correlations and random-effect linear models.Results: Spearman's correlation analyses at the whole-group level showed that higher hallucination-specific insight was related to higher MMSE score (rs = 0.39, p rs = -0.28, p p p = 0.003), and to VH duration (p = 0.04). Interestingly, insight was linked to the distress component but not the frequency component of severity. No significant relationship was found between MMSE and hallucination severity in these analyses.Conclusion: Our findings highlight the importance of hallucination-specific insight, distress and duration across groups. A better understanding of the role these factors play in VH may help with the development of future therapeutic interventions trans-diagnostically.

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