Correspondence

Per-Symptomatic Brain Activations in Alcohol-Induced Hallucinosis

Case Report

Ms. D was a 48-year-old woman who was admitted to the Lille University Medical Centre psychiatric ward due to frequent hallucinations that appeared following a drastic reduction of alcohol intake. Ms. D had no prior history of psychosis or hallucinations. Her psychiatric history included two previous suicide attempts in the context of acute alcohol intoxication. She reported the harmful use of alcohol since 17 years of age with a recent mean wine consumption of approximately 140 g/d of alcohol.

The Neural Correlates of Hallucinosis

A complete brain MRI exploration was conducted using a 3T X-series Philips Achieva scanner (Philips Medical Systems, Best, The Netherlands). Ms. D gave her consent to this exploration and to publish the case. She was right-handed. Resting fMRI was performed during Ms. D’s auditory hallucinations. Preprocessing and analyses were conducted according to the capture methodology described by Jardri et al. (5). To ensure that the activations obtained in this capture procedure could not be due to

Discussion

To the best of our knowledge, this is the first per-hallucinatory recording of cortical activations in a patient suffering from AIH. The hallucinations were concomitant with activation of language-related brain areas with a reversed functional asymmetry. This is characteristic of hallucinosis given that it cannot be related to handedness, medication, or trait factors associated with a chronic addictive disorder (e.g., Ms. D was her own control for the two fMRI acquisitions).

Auditory