DLN: Ghosts in the bedroom: Why do visual hallucinations happen in Parkinson’s disease?

Visual hallucinations are common and distressing in Parkinson’s disease. Patients nearly always describe seeing people or animals and they are more common in the evening and at night. I will present some of our recent work examining mechanisms of visual hallucinations, in particular considering them in a Bayesian framework and the evidence for over-weighting visual priors. I will also ask why hallucinations are particularly common in Parkinson’s disease, but far less common in other neurological conditions.


Bio
Dr Rimona Weil is a Principal Investigator at the UCL Dementia Research Centre and Consultant Neurologist at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, Queen Square. She leads a Wellcome-funded longitudinal research programme investigating dementia and hallucinations in Parkinson’s disease using neuroimaging and plasma markers. Alongside this, she leads a clinical service managing patients with Parkinson’s disease dementia and Dementia with Lewy Bodies.

Dr Weil studied medicine at Downing College, Cambridge, followed by University College London. She trained in Neurology at the Royal Free Hospital and the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery. Her PhD research was at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, UCL, where she examined the integration of visual signals in the healthy and damaged brain. She was awarded a post-doctoral UCL Excellence Fellowship to study visual changes in Parkinson’s disease, followed by a Wellcome Clinical Research Career Development Fellowship. Her ultimate aim is to develop treatments to slow the progression of dementia in Parkinson’s disease.