Reply: Dopamine agonists and delusional jealousy in Parkinson's disease: A cross‐sectional prevalence study

Abstract

Background: Delusional jealousy (DJ) has been described in patients with Parkinson’s disease (PD) on dopaminergic therapy, but a role for dopaminergic therapy in DJ has not been established. Methods: The current cross-sectional study on DJ investigated its association with dopaminergic therapies compared with their associations with hallucinations and its prevalence in PD patients. Eight hundred five consecutive patients with PD were enrolled between January 2009 and June 2010. Results: DJ was identified in 20 patients (2.48%) and hallucinations in 193 patients (23.98%). In the multivariate logistic regression analyses, dopamine agonists were significantly associated with DJ (odds ratio, 18.1; 95% CI, 3.0–infinity; P 5 .0002) but not with hallucinations (odds ratio, 0.73; 95% CI, 0.49–1.10; P 5 .133). Conclusions: These findings suggest that dopamine agonist treatment represents a risk factor for DJ in PD independent of the presence of a dementing disorder, and the presence of this additional nonmotor side effect should be investigated in this clinical population. V C 2012 Movement Disorder Society Delusional jealousy (DJ), also defined as Othello’s syndrome, is a content-specific delusion characterized by a range of irrational thoughts and emotions, together with associated unacceptable or extreme behavior, in which the dominant theme is a preoccupation with a partner’s sexual unfaithfulness based on unfounded evidence. 1,2 DJ has been described in neurological patients, especially those with right hemispheric stroke 3 and those with neurodegenerative disorders, including Alzheimer’s disease, 4,5 frontotemporal dementia, 5 Lewy body dementia, 5 and Parkinson’s disease (PD). 5‐14