RESEARCH ARTICLE Hallucinations in acutely a e n

Full list of author information is available at the end of the articleBackground Hallucinations, most often auditory in nature, are highly prevalent in schizophrenia and related psychotic disorders but prevalence figures vary greatly among different reports [1]. Auditory hallucinations in schizophrenia can be dra-matic and may have severe impact in affected individuals, and are sometimes associated with suicidality [2-4], vio-lence [5,6], and homicide [7]. Accordingly, hallucinations have traditionally been one of the main treatment targets for antipsychotic drugs and indeed the positive psychotic symptoms of schizophrenia collectively are far more re-sponsive to these drugs than negative or other cognitive symptoms [8,9]. Importantly, patients with schizophrenia and related disorders are a very heterogeneous group symptomatically [10]. Consequently, to optimize treatment effectiveness in different symptomatic subgroups of pa-tients, individually tailoring drug regimens should be an important aim. However, the results from clinical drug tri-als very rarely focus on single symptom scores such as hal-lucinations but typically report group mean changes o