The article below is not very new but it brought up a fascinating and often disturbing side effect of Lewy body demetia: Hallucinations.
I’ve raised this question before but I wonder why people with Lewy body and Alzheimer’s and to s.a lesser extent Parkinson’s have certain themes or touchstones. There have long been reports of hallucinations involving animals, cats dogs. insects running around the room; a person behind you whom you can only see out of the corner of your eye.
I was getting these in the early days of my diagnosis and they have declined a lot — sometimes depending on circumstances, such as being tired, or missing or late with a medication. I’ve had just a few very vivid hallucinations. One involved looking out my back window and seeing a group of little girls say 4 too 6 years old having a tea party in my back yard. I literally had to rub my eyes to rid myself of the hallucination. It wasn’t a bad or scary hallucination. Another one involved several ghostly figures entering the confines of my man-cave and sitting down nest to me. I had a weird feeling of calm mixed with fluctuating fear. But I started talking to them — making son-in-law nervous as he observed me from 10 feet away or more carrying on a conversation with myself. But what this technique does is ground yourself, by talking and bringing your world back into play. I have learned to make most apparitions go away and leave by talking to them, a friendly little chat and then tell them I want to watch a little TV
So, boiled down I wonder what it is in our brains that make so many people see the same types of things, dogs (puppies), cats and kittens, rodents scurrying, insects crawling, people turning into cartoon like caricatures of themselves.
I saw a documentary the other night on hallucinogenic drug use and one of the key observations from those under influence sounds something like this: “I feel like we are all connected. I see it how everything is tied together. I see the system.”
Here’s the information, which I said is not exactly new. But I’ve seen this information out there in several different forums and has the ring of truth to it. Sounds like hallucinations can be a key indicator in making a quicker Lewy body diagnosis.
Early Visual Hallucinations Greatly Increase Odds of LBD Over Alzheimer’s
Visual hallucinations are a core feature of dementia with Lewy bodies, occurring in 32 to 85 percent of autopsy-confirmed cases. Individuals with Alzheimer’s disease also experience hallucinations, though to a lesser degree and typically later in the course of the disease. New research reveals the onset of visual hallucinations within 5 years of developing dementia increases the odds of pathology-confirmed Lewy body disease 4-5 times over Alzheimer’s disease.
Research led by Tanis J. Ferman, Ph.D., associate professor at Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville, FL, studied brain tissue samples of autopsied individuals with a well-documented history of dementia, and who had died within the last 3 years. This included 41 individuals with autopsy-confirmed pathologic Lewy body disease (LBD), 70 individuals with autopsy-confirmed Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and 14 individuals with Alzheimer’s disease and amygdala-predominant Lewy bodies (AD-ALB). Samples were also categorized by density of Alzheimer’s and/or Lewy body pathology using Braak staging. Questionnaires were sent to the next-of-kin, to learn at what age the person’s dementia started and the approximate onset of any visual hallucinations, misperceptions and misidentification of family members during the life of the person with dementia.