qEEG in the Diagnosis and Prognosis of a Case with Delusional Infestation

Abstract

Stroke can have neuropsychological consequences, such as poststroke psychosis. One aspect of poststroke psychosis is delusional infestation (DI), also known as delusional parasitosis. Patients with DI have fixed sensations that they get infested by lice. Some explanations of DI indicate that striatal and fronto-cortical structural and functional abnormalities are related to DI symptomatology. In this case report, we present a patient with DI due to right intracarotid artery occlusion, which is detected radiologically. Before treatment with escitalopram and risperidone, the case had a frontal slowing in quantitative electroencephalography activity, which was normalized after 2 weeks of treatment. At the end of treatment, psychotic symptoms and OCD symptoms evaluated by the Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale, the Scale for the Assessment of Positive Symptoms, were remarkably reduced. These results revealed the role of brain imaging studies in the diagnosis and prognosis of DI.