Shared Delusional Parasitosis in Two Families: Clinical Insights Into Folie à Deux and Folie à Trois
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Unlabelled: Delusional parasitosis is a rare psychotic disorder characterized by individuals firmly believing that they are infested with parasites despite no medical evidence. It may be shared among close contacts-termed folie à deux when 2 individuals are affected or folie à trois when 3 individuals share the delusion. Delusional parasitosis' somatic focus often leads patients to seek dermatologists, causing delayed diagnoses and unnecessary antiparasitic treatments. Herein, we present 2 familial cases of shared delusional parasitosis. In both cases, patients exhibited the matchbox sign, presenting nonparasitic materials as "evidence" of infestation. Dermatological and psychiatric evaluations excluded organic causes, diagnosing primary delusional parasitosis. Treatment with antipsychotic medications led to symptom remission. Psychoeducation was critical in preventing relapse in secondary cases. Delusional parasitosis with shared delusions is often misdiagnosed, requiring dermatologists to recognize it early. A multidisciplinary approach that combines psychiatric care and psychoeducation is essential for effective management and for preventing the reinforcement of delusional beliefs.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".