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Causality: well established
Causality assessment · Causality: well established
Methylphenidate and Hallucination, visual: is the FAERS signal real?
A written Bradford Hill assessment of one drug–event pair. The grade is a judgement about the signal, not a statement that this drug causes this event in any one person; FAERS counts are reports, not rates.
Methylphenidate ↔ Hallucination, visual
n=117 co-reports · PRR 4.1 · ROR 4.1
Methylphenidate is a stimulant that increases synaptic dopamine and noradrenaline; hallucinations and psychotic symptoms are labelled, dose-related adverse effects, described in children and adults both with and without pre-existing psychosis (117 visual-hallucination co-reports here, PRR 4.1). The label advises caution in patients with psychotic or bipolar disorders, and the effects usually resolve on dose reduction or withdrawal.
Regulatory basis: methylphenidate prescribing information — psychiatric adverse events including hallucinations and psychosis.
| Bradford Hill viewpoint | Status | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Temporality (necessary) | met | Psychosis emerges with treatment |
| Strength | met | PRR 4.1, moderate |
| Consistency | met | Described across stimulant series |
| Specificity | partial | Shared across stimulant drugs |
| Biological gradient | met | Dose-related |
| Plausibility | met | Excess dopaminergic stimulation |
| Coherence | met | Fits the pharmacology |
| Experiment | met | Trials and case series support it |
| Analogy | met | Analogous to amphetamine psychosis |
This table is this page's own qualitative read of the literature cited above, not an automated or citation-gated assessment — see the note at the bottom of this page.
✗ No ClinicalTrials.gov results-posting trial in the top search hits for methylphenidate captured hallucination, visual as a tracked adverse event in a usable structure. Stimulant trials reported psychiatric events among general adverse events rather than as a clean per-arm table entry.