Classical Koro and Koro-Like Symptoms: Illustration from Canada

Koro syndrome has been colorfully described as a pathological distortion of one’s body image of the genital organ. In Koro, body image dysphoria is characterized by severe anxiety related to the delusional idea that one’s genitals will shrink and retract into one’s abdomen, eventually leading to death. This syndrome was first reported in South East Asia, where endemics have been described, but it has also sporadically occurred globally. We present a systematic literature review on Koro syndrome and report 7 cases from Canada. A search review with PubMed and Google Scholar resulted in 504 entries. Sixty-seven manuscripts were eventually selected following a thorough elimination process. The resultant literature underscored the cultural diversity that underlay the reported cases. Various aspects of Koro have been examined (eg, etiological, clinical, diagnostic, and cultural aspects). It has stimulated substantial scholarly debate, discussions, correspondences, and arguments from anthropological, psychiatric, psychological, and biological perspectives. In our series, it seems that Koro could have been misattributed here. The primary concern was not with penile retraction of the cases. To our knowledge, this is the first time that a series of cases is documented from North America where the syndrome is often ignored. We highlight the potential differences between the classical Koro syndrome and a collection of beliefs related to the perception or delusion of penile retraction in other codable psychiatric disorders, Koro-like syndrome. Understanding Koro syndrome beyond geographic boundaries is in line with our collected case reports of Koro from outside Asia.

Religion and delusion

We review scholarship that examines relationships - and distinctions - between religion and delusion. We begin by outlining and endorsing the position that both involve belief. Next, we present the prevailing psychiatric view that religious beliefs are not delusional if they are culturally accepted. While this cultural exemption has controversial implications, we argue it is clinically valuable and consistent with a growing awareness of the social - as opposed to purely epistemic - function of belief formation. Finally, we review research on continuities between religious and delusional cognition, which reveals that religious content is quite common in delusions and which provides tentative evidence for a positive relationship between religious belief and delusion-like belief in the general population.