Micropsia, which is more commonly known as Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, is a visual neurological condition that affects the way people perceive objects. It alters the way that people see body parts or external objects, making things look either much larger or smaller than they actually are, with the most intense symptoms coming at night.
An example of this condition was first seen in a six year old child. He was brought into a lab after claiming that he everything that he saw was extremely far away and tiny. When nighttime rolled around, the false perceptions began to come more frequently, about every fifteen to twenty minutes, but every test came back negative. Magnetic resonance imaging came back negative, Epstein-Barr virus testing (a serological test for a herpesvirus) was negative, and H1N1 wasn’t present. There was no clear cause then, and there’s no clear cause now.
Along with problems with spatial perception, symptoms include migraines, losing a sense of time, strong hallucinations, and, on rare occasions, distortion eerauditory and tactile perception. The most common warped perception associated with this condition is warping of the head and hands. The trademark symptom, however, is migraines. This is what causes patients to lose their sense of time, making them feel as though time is either passing at a snail’s pace or much too quickly, and what causes hallucinations (visualizing things that are not there and getting the wrong impression about situations and events that are happening at that point in time).
The hallucinations could come as often as several times during the day, and they may then take a while to subside. If a patient doesn’t know what is happening, or why they are suffering from these frightening distortions of reality, then it can cause quite a panic. It can leave the individual either terrified, anxious, or panic-stricken, but the manifestations are never really detrimental or dangerous.
No one really knows much about Alice in Wonderland Syndrome; it has been hypothesized that temporal lobe epilepsy has something to do with the appearance of the disease, as well as brain tumors. Tests have been run that prove associations with Lyme disease, mononucleosis (an abnormally high number of monocytes in the blood), and the H1N1-influenza infection, although not all cases can be linked to these diseases; this proves that Alice in Wonderland Syndrome varies from person to person and case to case. Symptoms vary, and there is no way to predict which symptoms a patient will suffer from. It is a disease that is also often misdiagnosed, since most physicians aren’t even aware that the condition exists. This results in inadequate treatment, although there isn’t truly an adequate form of treatment for a disease such as this one.
The truth is, the fact that the cause of this disease isn’t known means that there is no definite cure. There is no one wonder drug that can cure all the symptoms of micropsia. Instead, targeted treatments must be administered for probable causes of the disease. The most common treatment plan primarily consists of administering medications such as anticonvulsants, calcium channel blockers, antidepressants, and beta blockers, all of which are drugs that will relieve migraine pain. These, along with a “migraine diet” regimen, provides massive relief.