Neurology Minute

In part six of this seven-part series on FND, Dr. Jon Stone and Dr. Gabriela Gilmour discuss the prognosis of functional neurologic disorders.  Show citation:  Gelauff J, Stone J. Prognosis of functional neurologic disorders. Handb Clin Neurol. 2016;139:523-541. doi:10.1016/B978-0-12-801772-2.00043-6  Show transcript:  Dr. Jon Stone: This is Jon Stone with the Neurology Minute. Gabriela Gilmour and I are back to continue with part six of our seven-part series on FND. Today we're going to talk about prognosis. What's the outlook for people with FND? It's obviously a question that patients and relatives desperate to know the answer. Gabriela, what do you say to your patients with FND when they say, "What's going to happen to me? Dr. Gabriela Gilmour: That's a difficult question because the prognosis is variable and I'll talk in a moment about what we know about prognosis from the literature. But I think when patients ask me what's going to happen, I try to instill hope because we do know that this is a condition that can improve and it can improve, especially when patients have access to rehabilitation programs or psychotherapy or other treatment plans. So I try to emphasize that piece and emphasize hope when I'm talking about that with my patients. But if we sort of take a step back and we look at what is the overall prognosis from what we know in the literature with FND, fundamentally, FND for many is a chronic and often relapsing condition. As I mentioned, it can certainly improve with rehabilitation. A challenge is that most of our published studies on the prognosis of FND really come from a time when we knew a lot less about the condition and we had fewer treatment options. So these studies are somewhat difficult to apply today, but in these studies, we see that at least without treatment, most patients are the same or worse at follow-up. However, now we're starting to develop more rehabilitation programs and we have more evidence that shows that people certainly improve with rehabilitation and with therapy. There are some factors that I try to emphasize to patients as being good prognostic factors when I'm talking with them. These may be things like younger age, a shorter duration between symptom onset and diagnosis and patient agreement with the diagnosis or the perception of having control over their illness. When these types of things are present, I try to highlight them to, again, help build that hope for recovery. The one thing that I would also add maybe a bit of a different question, but I think is important to mention is that we as neurologists still have a lot to provide to our patients, even those who may not see much recovery in their symptoms and live with chronic illness. It's really important to consider that regular check-ins. In these check-ins, we can monitor for changing perpetuating factors. We can facilitate social services, mobility aids that help overall quality of life. We can still offer a lot to our patients. The other piece that I would mention too is that our patients are at risk of iatrogenic harm. So there is definitely a role for the neurologist to look at, are there medications that might not be indicated that are causing harm? Are there other things that we can communicate clearly with other care providers to make sure that we reduce that risk for our patients? Dr. Jon Stone: So it's about balancing some realism, but also making sure the patient doesn't lose hope. A good outcome isn't always necessarily that symptoms gone away. It might be similar to other chronic neurological conditions that we look after where we're okay with an outcome where the patient still has symptoms if they understand their condition and can learn to live with it better. We'll be back for our final Neurology Minute episode on FND with myself and Gabriela Gilmour talking about future directions in FND. Thanks for listening.

In part five of this seven-part series on FND, Dr. Jon Stone and Dr. Gabriela Gilmour discuss treatment options.  Show citation:  Gilmour, G.S., Nielsen, G., Teodoro, T. et al. Management of functional neurological disorder. J Neurol 267, 2164–2172 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00415-020-09772-w  Gilmour GS, Langer LK, Bhatt H, MacGillivray L, Lidstone SC. Factors Influencing Triage to Rehabilitation in Functional Movement Disorder. Mov Disord Clin Pract. 2024;11(5):515-525. doi:10.1002/mdc3.14007  Stone J, Carson A. Multidisciplinary Treatment for Functional Movement Disorder. Continuum (Minneap Minn). 2025;31(4):1182-1196. doi:10.1212/cont.0000000000001606 Tolchin B, Goldstein LH, Reuber M, et al. Management of Functional Seizures Practice Guideline Executive Summary: Report of the AAN Guidelines Subcommittee. Neurology. 2026;106(1):e214466. doi:10.1212/WNL.0000000000214466  Show transcript:  Dr. Jon Stone: Hello, this is Jon Stone with the Neurology Minute. Gabriela Gilmour and I are back to continue with part five of our seven-part series on FND. Today we'll be discussing treatment. Gabriela, talk us through what the rehabilitation or therapy approaches exist for FND now. Dr. Gabriela Gilmour: I would start actually even before jumping into rehabilitation and therapy to again emphasize something that we talked about in the last episode, which is that rehabilitation very much starts at our first visits with our patients when we examine for positive signs and show these to our patients and explain what they mean. So education about FND is really a fundamental treatment step, and I think we as neurologists have so much to offer to our patients in these visits. Next, when we're thinking about rehabilitation for FND, this often includes some combination of physical rehabilitation and psychological therapy and really should be individualized to each patient. So multidisciplinary or integrated therapy approaches are the gold standard and treatment strategies with these are really guided by our evolving understanding of the mechanisms of FND. So for example, this means using strategies like distraction, motor visualization, relaxation and mindfulness to target that underlying mechanism of FND. And then we use psychological therapies to also address perpetuating factors. So as we have discussed in this series, patients often experience many symptoms. So we also want to think about those other symptoms in our treatment plan, whether that be chronic pain or sleep disturbance or treating comorbid psychiatric or neurological illness. When we think about the subtypes of FND, there is some research into specific strategies for each. So psychotherapy, in particular, cognitive behavioral therapy is the focus for functional dissociative seizures with strategies aimed at attack prevention. Whereas for functional movement disorder, motor retraining physiotherapy has the most evidence. One big thing that I want to emphasize though is that rehabilitation for FND really relies on patient self-management and patient engagement. So I often explain to my patients that I can't retrain their brain, but I can help support them in this process and doing this for themselves. Dr. Jon Stone: So when you meet a patient with FND, how do you decide whether therapy is going to be helpful for them? I think people often have a tendency to say, "Oh, it's FND right off you go to psychotherapy or physiotherapy," but is that always the right option? How should we try and help our patients to decide if it's the right time for them to do these treatments? Dr. Gabriela Gilmour: Yeah, I think that that's something that's really maybe not unique, but something that's really important to FND and to treatment planning and FND. When we're supporting our patients as they embark on a treatment pathway, we really want to set them up for success. And so this really does rely on a robust triage process. So unlike other neurological conditions where you have X disease, therefore, why is the treatment? For FND, we've got a host of different types of treatments, and we want to individualize that and we want to time it right. Fundamentally, we really want to select the right treatment for our patients, and that relies on us understanding what symptoms are most bothersome to our patients, and we want to then provide that treatment at the right time. And I think right time is really what I would emphasize as being so, so important. So this means that patients are ready for active participation and rehabilitation, they're enthusiastically opted in. They think that treatment's going to help, and there aren't major barriers that are going to impact their ability to participate fully, so things like severe pain that could get in the way. And this is a conversation that I have really openly with my patients, and I really try to let them guide the timing. They will let me know, "Hey, I'm a teacher, and I'm in school right now. Now is not the right time for me to embark on this, but what about in June or July?" And then we revisit and regroup at that time. So really I do let my patients guide this process, but I would say that there are a subset of patients that don't need these more advanced rehabilitation type programs. Maybe are spontaneously improved or are able to implement some of their own self-management strategies on their own and have a significant improvement in symptoms already. Dr. Jon Stone: We need to make it easy for our patients to tell us when it's not the right time, but also, there's no one-size-fits-all, basically. Dr. Gabriela Gilmour: Absolutely. Dr. Jon Stone: So we'll be back for more Neurology Minute to continue our discussion on FND. We'll be talking about prognosis. Thanks for listening.

Dr. Zohaib Siddiqi talks with Dr. Catarina Bernardes about a case involving a 35-year-old woman presenting with personality changes and gait impairment.  Show citation:  Bernardes C, Lemos JM, Santo GC. Clinical Reasoning: A 35-Year-Old Woman With Personality Change and Gait Impairment. Neurology. 2025;104(2):e210252. doi:10.1212/WNL.0000000000210252  Show transcript:  Dr. Zohaib Siddiqi: Hi, everyone. My name is Zohaib Siddiqi and I'm a fifth-year neurology resident and a part of the Neurology® Resident and Fellow Section Editorial Board. I just finished interviewing Catarina Bernardes about her article, Clinical Reasoning: A 35-year-old Woman with Personality Change and Gait Impairment. Catarina, can you tell us the main points of the article? Dr. Catarina Bernardes: So in this article, we discussed the case of a 35-year-old woman who presented with a three-year history of walking difficulties. On examination, she had signs of a frontal temporal dysfunction, a dorsal lateral myelopathy, optic atrophy, and pes cavus. Her brain and spinal cord MRI was completely normal, but her son's brain MRI was being studied for spastic paraparesis showed signs of hypomyelination involving the subcortical U fibers. Given the suggestive inheritance pattern, we considered an X-linked leukoencephalopathy and central nervous system hypomyelination points to Pelizaeus-Merzbacher disease. Important learning points. When differentiating leukoencephalopathies, remember that hypomyelinating disorders often have less pronounced hypointensity on T2 and hypointensity on T1, and in demyelinating disorders, there is very prominent hyperintensity on T2 and hypointensity on T1. Also, Pelizaeus-Merzbacher is a hypomyelinating disorder affecting the subcortical U fibers, while X-linked adrenoleukodystrophy presents a demyelinating pattern sparing the subcortical U fibers and involving mainly the parietooccipital regions. Dr. Zohaib Siddiqi: Thanks so much for that summary, Catarina. A lot of learning points there. For those of you who want to learn more about the case, you can listen to the full-length podcast available now on all streaming platforms and find the article titled, Clinical Reasoning: A 35-year-old Woman with Personality Change and Gait Impairment on the Neurology® Resident Fellow Website. Thanks so much for joining today, and see you next time. 

In part four of this seven-part series on FND, Dr. Jon Stone and Dr. Gabriela Gilmour discuss the diagnostic explanation.  Show citation:  Stone J. Functional neurological disorders: the neurological assessment as treatment. Pract Neurol. 2016;16(1):7-17. doi:10.1136/practneurol-2015-001241  Gilmour GS, Lidstone SC. Moving Beyond Movement: Diagnosing Functional Movement Disorder. Semin Neurol. 2023;43(1):106-122. doi:10.1055/s-0043-1763505  Podcast transcript:  Dr. Gabriela Gilmour: This is Gabriela Gilmour with the Neurology Minute. Jon Stone and I are back to continue with part four, of seven, of our series on functional neurological disorder. Today we will focus on the diagnostic explanation. So many patients have never heard of FND before receiving this diagnosis. Can you share how you explain the diagnosis to your patients? Dr. Jon Stone: So I'm aware that many neurologists do find this difficult. And I have to say, having thought about it for 20 years or so now, I think the answer is, don't be weird. Do what you normally do with any condition, when you explain it to patients. I think what goes wrong is that people see FND as something weird and other, and they start to do weird things like telling people that their scans are normal, or telling them what they don't have before they've started to tell them what they do. If you go with the normal rules of explanation, first of all, starting by giving it a name that you prefer, so you've got FND, or try and be specific if you can. You've got functional seizures, functional movement disorder. Give it a name to start with. Don't sort of spend a long time beating around the bush before you do that. Talk a bit about why you've made the diagnosis, because that's what you normally do. So if someone's got a weak leg, show them their Hoover's sign. I think actually showing people their physical signs is probably one of the most powerful things you can do, brings the diagnosis away from the scanner and into the clinic room. And also, they can see in front of them the potential for improvement. So it feeds forward into treatment. Yes, you might need to explain why they don't have some other conditions that they're worried about, but you can leave discussions about why it's happened for later. I think what tends to go wrong is people jump into that too early. So the bottom line, just do what you normally do and things generally go a lot more smoothly. Dr. Gabriela Gilmour: And when you're providing the diagnostic explanation, it can be really helpful to link the patient's experience and their symptoms to the diagnosis. And so, I wonder how you integrate that piece into your diagnostic explanation, or how you tailor your explanation to an individual patient. Dr. Jon Stone: Yeah, I think tailoring is really important here. And this is where obviously if you've done your assessment, so helpful to ask the patient is, "Well, what do you think's wrong? What things were you worried about? " Some people say, "Look, I'm really worried I've got MS." Or some people say, "I haven't got FND. I've read about that. " Or sometimes people are wondering if they've got FND. So, you've got to try and tailor it to what the person is expecting and particularly previous experiences. If they're telling you how angry they were about doctors A, B, and C, then obviously you want to use that and try not to end up with the same outcome. Why would there be a problem with this diagnosis? It's because they haven't heard about it, because they've got misconceptions about it. Do they feel that this diagnosis would be saying it's all in their mind or something like that? You might need to be explicit about that. But I think this links into how, it's not just about the diagnostic label, it's about a formulation, which is something we don't think about much in neurology. So there's a label for what's wrong, but in FND, a formulation, why have you got FND, in your particular case, is what we're sort of moving on to there based on the story that you've heard. Dr. Gabriela Gilmour: Yeah. And I think in my experience and in working with trainees, really just practicing, saying it, is so important and saying it in a way that feels honest and correct to you as a clinician. Dr. Jon Stone: Yeah, absolutely. Dr. Gabriela Gilmour: So we will be back for more Neurology Minute episodes to continue our discussion on FND. Next, we're going to be talking about treatment. Thanks for listening.

In part three of this seven-part series on FND, Dr. Jon Stone and Dr. Gabriela Gilmour discuss causes of functional neurologic disorder.  Show citation:  Hallett M, Aybek S, Dworetzky BA, McWhirter L, Staab JP, Stone J. Functional neurological disorder: new subtypes and shared mechanisms. Lancet Neurol. 2022;21(6):537-550. doi:10.1016/S1474-4422(21)00422-1 Show transcript:  Dr. Gabriela Gilmour: This is Gabriela Gilmour with the Neurology Minute. Jon Stone and I are back to continue with part three of our seven-part series on functional neurological disorder. Today, we will focus on the causes of FND. So Jon, there have been many advances in our understanding of the mechanism of FND in the last 10, 15 years. And so what do we know about this now? Dr. Jon Stone: I think the key message I want to get across here is that whereas previously we had a very psychiatric, purely psychiatric view of FND, it used to be called conversion disorder, what we've got now is a multi-perspective view of the mechanisms, which mean that we can understand FND at a kind of neural level or brain circuit level, but we can also still retain the importance of psychological factors, traumatic events. And I think it's also important to separate out, as you've done here with a question, what's the mechanism? How is the symptom happening versus why is it happening? Which often people don't do. So for this question, how is it happening? How is it that somebody, for example, gets a weak leg? Well, at a very simple level, their brain is disconnecting from their leg and that's what dissociation is. And you can explain that to patients at sort of brain circuit level. We've learned that there are disruptions probably in the circuits in our brain that relate to that sense of agency, the parts of our brain that tell us that our bodies belong to us. And people are particularly interested in an area called the temporary parietal junction. And at a higher broader level, people are particularly interested in the idea that FND is a disorder that you would expect to happen based on our understanding of the brain as a predictive organ. So if the brain spends its time predicting things, maybe in FND what's gone wrong is this is very strong prediction that the leg is weak or that there's a tremor or that a seizure's about to happen that overrides sensory input telling our brain otherwise. Dr. Gabriela Gilmour: And I guess to follow into that, you mentioned what is going on. So now can you talk a little bit about why somebody might develop FND or the etiology of FND? Dr. Jon Stone:  I think this helps clinically as well as neurologists, because we can talk about mechanism as we would, for example, with MS as inflammation, but why is there inflammation? So okay, the brain's gone wrong, but why has it gone wrong? And there we need a much more complex view of multiple range of risk factors, predisposing, precipitating, and perpetuating that we know are associated with FND, but vary a lot from person to person. So no one person's the same. If you've had traumatic experiences in the past, that will make you more prone to dissociation. If you've had other functional disorders, if you have almost certainly some forms of genetics make people predisposed. And then as we said in the last episode, having another neurological condition, so having migraine aura, a physical injury, an infective illness, these are powerful reasons to trigger neurological symptoms. And it's not so much why they happen. It's more why do they get there and get stuck? We all probably have transient functional symptoms actually, but why they get stuck in people with FND for various reasons to do with the way their brains work or their past experiences, or sometimes what happens to them in medical systems. So developing a very open idea about why someone might have FND really helps you, I think, explain that back to patients and produce individual sort of formulations of the problem. Dr. Gabriela Gilmour: Yeah. And I often say to my patients, "I don't know exactly why you, why today have this." And that's true in medicine in general. We actually often don't know why anybody develops any medical condition with a few exceptions, but we know about risk factors really. Dr. Jon Stone: Absolutely. It's one of the reasons I hate the term medically unexplained. Actually, I think FND is perhaps more explained in some ways than some of the other conditions like multiple sclerosis and ALS that we actually deal with where we really don't know why they happen. Dr. Gabriela Gilmour: Well, we will be back for more Neurology Minute episodes to continue our discussion on FND. Thanks for listening.