Functional Brain Imaging in a Woman With Spatial Neglect Due to Conversion Disorder

To the Editor: Conversion disorder is a neurological disturbance that cannot be attributed to an organic disease but arises from unconscious psychological stress.1 Patients most often present with a motor, sensory, or visual deficit. Other cognitive symptoms such as amnesia, aphasia, or pseudodementia may also occur, but to our knowledge, spatial neglect (lateralized deficits in spatial attention typically following right-brain damage2) has not been reported in relation to conversion.1 We describe a patient who developed a spatial neglect syndrome of conversion origin in whom brain activity was investigated by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The patient provided written informed consent for publication of her case, and the study was approved by the ethics committee of Geneva University Hospital.