Drawing from the Netherlands Mental Health and Incidence Study (n=7075), researchers from the Netherlands and the U.K. examined psychotic experiences and clinical outcomes for groups no psychotic experiences, delusions only, hallucinations only, and both hallucinations and delusions. They found that hallucinations and delusions co-occur more often than predicted by chance, and that co-occurrence was associated more strongly with comorbid affective symptoms, negative symptoms, and persistence of psychotic experiences. “A specific ‘hallucinatory-delusional state’ may represent an early phase of exacerbation of aberrant attribution of salience, increasing risk for clinical outcome.” Results appeared online yesterday in Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica.
Smeets, F. Lataster, T. van Winkel, R. de Graaf, R. ten Have, M. van Os, J; “Testing the Hypothesis that Psychotic Illness Begins when Subthreshold Hallucination Combine with Delusional Ideation.” Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, online June 8, 2012