School of Medicine, University of Minho, Braga, Portugal.
REQUIMTE, LAQV, Laboratory of Applied Chemistry, Department of Chemical Sciences, Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Porto, Porto, Portugal.
Int J Psychiatry Clin Pract. 2021 Sep;25(3):220-232. doi: 10.1080/13651501.2020.1819335. Epub 2020 Sep 16.
Cotard delusion (CD) is a rare psychiatric disorder in which the patient believes to be dead, , the patient holds nihilistic delusions concerning his/her own existence. Taking into account its rarity, and possible subdiagnosis due to unawareness, most of the literature consists of case studies, complicating a more systematic approach and leading to difficulties in deciding the best clinical guidance to offer the patient suffering from CD. The objective of this work is to review the literature and propose an algorithm to help the differential diagnosis and the management of this condition.
To do so, an extensive literature research was performed using several bibliographic databases. Since data on this topic is scarce, references in every article were cross-checked, aiming to obtain all available peer-reviewed works on CD.
Research resulted in 328 cases. Several treatment modalities were reported to improve the symptoms of CD, from pharmacotherapy - mainly consisting of antipsychotics and antidepressants - to electroconvulsive therapy.
Despite its challenging diagnosis, the delusion can be treated with readily available care. Hopefully, this work can be a useful tool to doctors when encountering this odd affliction.
卡他性妄想到（CD）是一种罕见的精神科疾病，患者认为自己已经死亡，或者持有关于自己存在的虚无主义妄想。考虑到其罕见性，以及由于缺乏认识可能导致的亚诊断，大多数文献都由病例研究组成，这使得更系统的方法变得复杂，并导致难以决定为患有 CD 的患者提供最佳的临床指导。这项工作的目的是回顾文献并提出一个算法来帮助鉴别诊断和管理这种情况。
为此，我们使用了多个文献数据库进行了广泛的文献研究。由于关于这个主题的数据很少，我们在每篇文章中的参考文献都进行了交叉检查，旨在获得关于 CD 的所有可用同行评议的工作。
研究结果共 328 例。报道了几种治疗方法可以改善 CD 的症状，包括药物治疗 - 主要由抗精神病药和抗抑郁药组成 - 到电惊厥治疗。
尽管诊断具有挑战性，但可以用现成的护理来治疗这种妄想。希望这项工作可以成为医生遇到这种奇怪疾病时的有用工具。
