14 DAY TRIAL // A group of investigators from the University of Cambridge, in the United Kingdom, says that it may have discovered one of the reasons why obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) develops. The new finding negates an accepted explanation that scientists have been using for years.
The popular conception today is that disturbing, obsessive fears are what cause patients suffering from OCD to engage in behaviors such as repetitive hand-washing, which has became a staple of the disease.
Together with colleagues from the University of Amsterdam, the Cambridge researchers demonstrated the the behaviors (compulsions) themselves came way before the disease set in completely.
A major implication of this discovery could be the fact that the obsessions are a simple response that the brain produces to these compulsions. In other words, the obsessions themselves are not the root problem, but rather a manifestation in their own right.
The new data could in the near future be used by researchers to develop novel therapies aimed at treating OCD patients efficiently. More importantly, the information could also help design more advanced prevention strategies for at-risk groups.
Experts conducted the new work on 40 people, 20 of which had been diagnosed with OCD. The rest were healthy controls. Details of the Wellcome Trust-funded investigation appear in the latest issue of the esteemed American Journal of Psychiatry.
The task the participants had to carry out dealt with assessing their tendencies of forming habit-like behaviors. That is to say, subjects needed to learn to make associations between stimuli, behaviors and outcomes. This helped them win points on the task.
“It has long been established that humans have a tendency to ‘fill in the gaps’ when it comes to behaviour that cannot otherwise be logically explained,” Cambridge PhD student Claire Gillan says.
“In the case of OCD, the overwhelming urge to senselessly repeat a behavior might be enough to instill a very real obsessive fear in order to explain it,” the expert goes on to add.
The research team was led by Claire Gillan and Trevor Robbin, who are both based at the Cambridge MRC/Wellcome Trust Behavioral and Clinical Neuroscience Institute. UA expert Sanne de Wit was the third leader of the study group.