Delusions in Dementia

Abstract

Delusion is a common neuropsychiatric symptom in dementia, especially in Alzheimer disease and dementia with Lewy bodies. Persecutory delusions are the most common, and include delusions of theft, jealousy, and abundant. Patients with persecutory delusions have impairment of the psychological processes mediating the formation and maintenance of normal social beliefs. Several disordered psychological processes such as attentional bias, attributional bias, jumping-to-conclusions reasoning bias, and theory of mild deficit may contribute to the delusion formation. Cognitive processes involving information about self, others, and social interaction are required in social cognition. Damage of the neural circuitry involved in social cognition ("social brain"), such as the medial prefrontal cortex, may be a neuroanatomical basis for persecutory delusions in dementia.