Nicotine treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Following initial observations of marked effects of nicotine self-medication in a patient with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), another four OCD patients were treated with nicotine for eight weeks in an open label fashion. Patients fulfilling DSM-IV criteria for OCD and with initial Yale-Brown Obsessive-Compulsive Scale (YBOCS) score>15 were included in the study. The patients were scored with YBOCS, Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI), NIMH Global Obsessive-Compulsive Scale (NIMH) and Global Assessment of Functioning (GAF). Four of five patients receiving nicotine treatment displayed a favourable response with reductions in YBOCS scores. For these four patients, the nicotine chewing gum enabled a more adequate behaviour in stressful, OCD-eliciting, situations. We feel that these results are encouraging enough to warrant a larger, controlled study on nicotine treatment of OCD.