Observational studyCritical care (London, England)2025
Hallucinations and disturbed behaviour in the critically ill: incidence, patient characteristics, associations, trajectory, and outcomes.
Observational study in Critical care (London, England), 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
What it found
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- Beyond the chain of survival: a scoping review of artificial intelligence applications in cardiac arrest.World journal of emergency medicine · 2026Review
- Beyond the dose: rethinking ketamine neurotoxicity in critical illness.Intensive care medicine · 2025Article
- "Phantasia" in ICU: emulating to clarify ketamine's impact.Intensive care medicine · 2025Article
- Association of low-dose ketamine with hallucinations in critically ill patients: a target trial emulation.Intensive care medicine · 2025Article
- Delirium in ICU and Macbeth's dagger: author's reply.Intensive care medicine · 2025Article
- Hallucinations in critically ill patients: understanding the unreal.Critical care (London, England) · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
8 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
purposeTo use natural language processing (NLP) to study the incidence, characteristics, trajectory, associations, and outcomes of hallucinations and disturbed behaviour in intensive care unit (ICU) patients.
methodsWe used NLP to scan clinical progress notes of a large cohort of ICU patients to detect words indicating that a patient had experienced hallucinations. We also used NLP to detected disturbed behaviour during ICU stay. Moreover, we studied the use of antipsychotic medications in a nested cohort. Finally, we obtained the demographics, trajectory, associations, and outcome of these patients.
resultsWe conducted a non-interventional, observational study of 7525 patients. We found that 625 (8.31%) had experienced hallucinations. Among these, 623 (99.7%) also had NLP-diagnosed behavioural disturbance (NLP-Dx-BD). In contrast, in patients without hallucinations, only 3274 (47.4%) were NLP-Dx-BD positive. Among the 2904 nested cohort patients with electronic medications data, 252 (8.7%) experienced hallucinations. Of these, 60 (23.8%) received medications compared with 147 (5.5%) (p < 0.001) patients without hallucinations. There was no difference on outcomes in patients with or without hallucination.
conclusionsHallucinations affect one in 12 ICU patients and are strongly associated with disturbed behaviour, and the use of antipsychotic medications. Hallucinations may represent another phenotype of critical illness associated neurocognitive dysfunction and require a dedicated research program.
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