Brain reactivity to specific symptom provocation indicates prospective therapeutic outcome in OCD

The neuropsychology of obsessive compulsive disorder: the importance of failures in cognitive and behavioural inhibition as candidate endophenotypic markers

“…also employed a symptom provocation paradigm, this time in conjunction with fMRI, and replicated the finding of involvement of these-and other-neural regions . It has been suggested that brain reactivity to symptom provocation might be predictive of therapeutic outcome, and Hendler et al (2003) employed SPECT to examine brain perfusion during symptom provocation before six months of sertraline treatment. They found that those who responded successfully to treatment had significantly lower perfusion during symptom provocation prior to treatment in the right caudate, compared to non-responders.…”

The Effects of Psychotherapy on Brain Function — Major Depressive Disorder

“…By approaching the relationship between these two therapies neuroscientifically, an optimal therapy for depression can be chosen, and combined evidence of the efficacy of these two therapies can be prepared. [7,8] Most studies on functional imaging that analyzed the effect of psychotherapy on depression have used the nuclear medicine method. In such method, the brain metabolism and the blood flow on the pre-and post-treatment scans are compared using positron emission tomography (PET) or single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT).…”

Positron Emission Tomography Imaging of Risperidone Augmentation in Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor-Refractory Patients

“…Similar results were found with correlation analysis in a sample (n = 9) of patients with OCD for the left orbitofrontal cortex for fluoxetine [36] some of whom had a history of major affective illness and both left and right orbitofrontal cortex for paroxetine [37] . Activation during stress also implicated the anterior cingulate although low values predicted sertraline response indicating that subject state may be important [38] . Lower rCBF values in orbitofrontal cortex were associated with a better fluvoxamine response in a 9-patient study of patients with OCD [39] .…”