The Herczeg Institute on Aging, Tel-Aviv University and the Department of Health Promotion, School of Public Health, Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel-Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel.
Psychiatry Res. 2011 Aug 30;189(1):97-104. doi: 10.1016/j.psychres.2011.05.022. Epub 2011 Jun 12.
One of the common symptoms of dementia is delusions. Due to a biological conceptualization of the behaviors represented as delusions, these are classified as psychotic symptoms. This is a qualitative and quantitative study aiming to describe the delusions experienced by older persons with dementia and the context of occurrence, and to elucidate their etiology. Participants were 74 nursing home residents aged 65 and over, diagnosed with dementia, from nine nursing homes in Israel. Participants with delusions were found to have significantly more difficulties in performing ADLs, and poorer vision and hearing. Based on assessment using the BEHAVE-AD, six categories of delusions were examined: 1. One's house is not one's home, 2. Theft, 3. Danger, 4. Abandonment, 5. Misidentification, and 6. Other non-paranoid. Common themes appeared across delusions including reality, disorientation, re-experience of past events, loneliness and insecurity, boredom, and trigger. Current results suggest that delusions may not represent psychotic symptoms for most participants, because they sometimes represented reality, or were neither firm nor incontrovertible. Thus, utilizing the term delusion relegates the person's behavior to the domain of severe psychiatric phenomena and precludes understanding its true meaning.
痴呆的常见症状之一是妄想。由于对表现为妄想的行为进行了生物学概念化，因此将其归类为精神病症状。这是一项定性和定量研究，旨在描述痴呆老年人所经历的妄想及其发生的背景，并阐明其病因。参与者为来自以色列 9 家养老院的 74 名年龄在 65 岁及以上、被诊断患有痴呆症的养老院居民。研究发现，有妄想的参与者在进行日常生活活动方面存在明显更多的困难，并且视力和听力较差。根据使用 BEHAVE-AD 进行的评估，检查了六种类型的妄想：1. 一个人的房子不是一个人的家，2. 盗窃，3. 危险，4. 被遗弃，5. 身份识别错误，6. 其他非偏执狂。妄想中出现了一些共同的主题，包括现实、定向障碍、对过去事件的重新体验、孤独和不安全感、无聊和触发因素。目前的结果表明，对于大多数参与者来说，妄想可能并不代表精神病症状，因为它们有时代表现实，或者既不坚定也不无可争议。因此，使用“妄想”一词将人的行为归入严重精神现象的范畴，并排除了对其真正含义的理解。
