You are here

Article Text

Article menu
Download PDFPDF
Letter
Laterality of symptoms in patients admitted to a stroke unit who had a discharge diagnosis of a psychiatric condition
  1. C O Santos1,
  2. L Caeiro1,
  3. J M Ferro1,
  4. R Albuquerque2,
  5. M L Figueira2
  1. 1Stroke Unit, Serviço de Neurologia, Department of Neurosciences and Mental Health, Hospital de Santa Maria, Faculdade de Medicina de Lisboa, Portugal
  2. 2Psiquiatria, Department of Neurosciences and Mental Health, Hospital de Santa Maria, Faculdade de Medicina de Lisboa, Portugal
  1. Correspondence to:
 Dr C O Santos
 Serviço de Neurologia, Hospital de Santa Maria, 1649-035 Lisboa, Portugal; acostafm.ul.pt

https://doi.org/10.1136/jnnp.2005.062893

Statistics from Altmetric.com

    Request Permissions

    If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.

    Some psychiatric conditions produce symptoms that can mimic an acute neurological disease, including stroke.1–3 In several studies, such symptoms seemed to be more common on the left side of the body.1–3 The predominant processing of emotional information by the right hemisphere offers a hypothetical explanation for this finding.

    We reviewed the discharge summaries of patients who were admitted to a stroke unit during the period May 1996 to December 2003 with a diagnosis of acute stroke and who had a discharge diagnosis of somatoform disorder and/or anxiety disorder according to the DSM-IV, revised4 criteria, and no recent stroke, according to the World Health Organisation definition.5

    Two investigators (CS and LC) reviewed the discharge summaries independently …

    View Full Text

    Footnotes

    • Competing interests: none declared