BACKGROUND Visual hallucinations occur in various neurological diseases, but are most prominent in Lewy body dementia, Parkinson's disease and schizophrenia. The lifetime prevalence of visual hallucinations in patients with schizophrenia is much more common than conventionally thought and ranges from 24% to 72%. Cortical acetylcholine (ACh) depletion has been associated with visual hallucinatio...

CASE REPORT An 81-year-old woman with age-related macular degeneration and pseudoexfoliative glaucoma developed visual hallucinations (faces, flowers and frames) shortly after beginning brimonidine drops. Neurologic and psychiatric examination was normal. Visual hallucinations disappeared within 10 days after discontinuing the drug. DISCUSSION The Charles Bonnet syndrome (CBS) is characterise...

Visual hallucinations are well recognized in individuals with low vision and intact cognition (Charles Bonnet syndrome) (Teunisse et al., 1996). Visual hallucinations also occur in those with early manifestations of dementia with Lewy bodies (McKeith et al., 2005) and Parkinson’s disease dementia (Williams and Lees, 2005). Typically, visual hallucinations in these conditions are complex recurre...

OBJECTIVES Between 8% and 40% of patients with Parkinson's disease undergoing long term treatment will have visual hallucinations during the course of their illness. There were two main objectives: firstly, to review the literature on Parkinson's disease and summarise those factors most often associated with hallucinations; secondly, to carry out a clinical comparison of ambulant patients with ...

The exact pathogenesis of visual hallucinations in Parkinson's disease is not known but an integrated model has been proposed that includes impaired visual input and central visual processing, impaired brainstem regulation of sleep-wake cycle with fluctuating vigilance, intrusion of rapid eye movement dream imagery into wakefulness and emergence of internally generated imagery, cognitive dysfun...

Charles Bonnet syndrome (CBS) is a disorder in which psychologically normal people, often with vision impairment, experience complex visual hallucinations. The hallucinations are purely visual and do not occur in any other sensory modality, and people with CBS have full insight into the unreal nature of the hallucinations. This report describes the case of a CBS sufferer who experienced a distr...

Complex visual hallucinations may affect some normal individuals on going to sleep and are also seen in pathological states, often in association with a sleep disturbance. The content of these hallucinations is striking and relatively stereotyped, often involving animals and human figures in bright colours and dramatic settings. Conditions causing these hallucinations include narcolepsy-cataple...

A 29-year-old woman with schizophrenia introduced for application of repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation for refractory visual hallucinations. Following inhibitory rTMS on visual cortex she reported significant reduction in severity and simplification of complexity of hallucinations, which lasted for three months. rTMS can be considered as a possibly potent treatment for visual halluci...

Sir: Emslie et al. recently reported results of 2 controlled studies of venlafaxine in children and adolescents. In one study, 2 of 169 subjects experienced hallucinations as an adverse event. In the other study, 1 of 86 patients experienced hallucinations. The nature of these hallucinations was not specified in either article. The adult literature describes antidepressants with serotonin reupt...