Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a debilitating psychological condition that impacts millions of people globally. The front-line intervention for OCD exposure/response prevention (ERP), however, many individuals do not respond to this treatment approach. Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) new therapeutic option which could be effective in treating OCD. This review examin...

Pharmacotherapeutic options for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) have expanded over the past half-century since medications were first found to be effective for the treatment of OCD. Currently, the serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SRIs) represent the first-line pharmacotherapy for OCD. High dosages and long trials of the SRIs are needed for adequate treatment of OCD. The use of SRIs for the tr...

Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) has been linked to reward dysfunctions, highlighting a possible role of anhedonia in OCD. Surprisingly, anhedonia in OCD has never been evaluated. Moreover, although nicotine typically has anti-anhedonic effects, anecdotal reports suggest low prevalence rates of smoking in OCD. To address these two phenomena, 113 individuals with OCD completed a battery of qu...

OBJECTIVE Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is highly heritable. Attempts to delineate precise genetic contributions have met with limited success. There is an ongoing search for intermediate cognitive brain markers (endophenotypes) that may help clarify genetic contributions. The aim was to assess inhibitory control processes in unaffected first-degree relatives of OCD patients for the first...

OBJECTIVE To measure the association of perfectionism with obsessive-compulsive and depressive symptoms in children and adolescents with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). METHOD Sample consisted of 94 youth (44 boys, 49 girls; mean age = 13.2 y, SD = 2.5 y) with a DSM-IV diagnosis of OCD. Perfectionism beliefs were measured with both the Adaptive/Maladaptive Perfectionism Scale (AMPS) and ...

In this study, we assess the neuropsychological profiles of both early and late symptom-onset obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) patients. The early and late-onset OCD patients are compared to the control group with a series of neuropsychological measurements. The late-onset OCD patients exhibited impaired performance on the immediate and the delayed recall conditions of the Rey-Osterrieth Com...

Current cognitive-behavioral models of the etiology of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) suggest that maladaptive appraisal of otherwise normal intrusive thoughts have their origins in early learning experiences. The present study investigated the relationship between adverse childhood experience and OCD symptoms and related dysfunctional beliefs in a general population using a structural equ...

OBJECTIVE This study examined implicit sequence learning in patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) under dual-task conditions. Frontal-striatal networks support implicit learning and are implicated in the pathophysiology of OCD. Neuroimaging data suggest that during implicit learning, OCD patients use neural systems normally active during explicit learning to compensate for striatal ...

SSRI’s are an effective pharmacological treatment strategy for treating symptoms of OCD. The benefit of treating OCD using SSRI’s was discovered as an unintended beneficial side effect from the treatment of depression using SSRI’s. While not everyone who experiences OCD symptoms benefit from SSRI’s, novel treatment approaches examining the augmentation of SSRI’s have been shown to provide addit...

BACKGROUND Temper outbursts in youth with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) are a common source of concern, but remain poorly understood. This study examined a set of hypotheses related to: (a) the prevalence of temper outbursts in paediatric OCD, (b) the associations of temper outbursts with OCD severity and depressive symptoms; and (c) the influence of temper outbursts on treatment response...