Neuropsychological Assessment in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

Abstract

Background:Neuropsychological deficits in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) have been encouraged by brain imaging studies suggesting a putative fron to- striatial biological basis of the condition. Studies of neuropsychological functions in OCD have documented deficits in several cognitive domains, particularly with regard to visuospatial abilities, executive functioning, motor speed and memory. The Aim of the present study was to assess neuropsychological profile of patients with OCD. Objectives of the study were to assess and compare the neuropsychological profile of patients with OCD and matched healthy controls.Materials and Methods:Twenty clinically stable outpatients with ICD-10 diagnosis of OCD and equal number of normal controls matched for age, education, gender and handedness were studied using a battery of neuropsychological tests. The tests consisted of verbal and performance tests of intelligence, memory, perceptual motor functions, set test and Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST).Results:On perceptual-motor functions, verbal fluency, executive functions (WCST), intelligence and memory patients with OCD did not show impairments comparable to healthy controls. An attempt to correlate the test findings with the duration of illness, stability of illness and the average drug dose was made and it was found that there was no correlation between the two.Conclusion:The present study does not provide evidence for a localized neuropsychological/cognitive impairment in OCD in cases that are stable for at least three months. Absence of impairments in perceptual-motor functions, verbal fluency, executive functions (WCST), intelligence, and memory does not agree with the results of other studies using these tests.

Conditioned Fear Extinction, Neuropsychological, and Psychological Aspects of OCD in Latinos

“…The fact that there were no significant differences between groups on other neuropsychological tests suggests that the neuropsychological functioning of OCD subjects can be altered upon the presence of emotional stimuli. These results add relevant information to the controversial findings on the neuropsychological performance of individuals with OCD (Abramovitch & Cooperman, 2015;Kohli et al, 2015). Lack of differences between groups in fear recall and fear renewal suggests that OCD in Puerto Ricans may not be characterized by difficulty in maintaining fear acquisition and extinction memories.…”

“…Other studies have found deficiencies in tasks that require set-shifting (Tukel et al, 2012) and response inhibition in individuals with OCD (Pena-Garijo et al, 2010). However, Kohli et al (2015) assessed verbal intelligence, memory, perceptual and motor functions in OCD outpatients using tests, such as the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) and the Bhatia Battery of Performance tests of Intelligence (BSS) and participants did not show impairments in any of the cognitive functions, compared to healthy controls. The controversial findings of neuropsychological functions in individuals with OCD enhance the need to assess these functions, especially in Puerto Ricans, given the lack of research in Latinos with OCD (Williams et al, 2010).…”

Cognitive Dysfunction in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

“…On the TMT-B, the results seem to be inconsistent with some studies finding equal performances between OCD patients and healthy controls [13,19,20,25,34,35,51] while others do not [11,17,30,33]. With the WCST, there is far less inconsistencies, especially with regard to perseverative errors, with a pronounced trend towards poorer performance exhibited by OCD patients [8,11,[14][15][16]19,22,[34][35][36]40,44,45,51,[56][57][58][59][60][61]; even though some studies failed to report this difference [13,21,24,25,31,49,62,63] More recently, computerized tasks were developed to assess behavioral flexibility with more specificity and in a more controlled fashion. Indeed, even though they were designed to assess flexibility, the TMT-B and WCST are not specific to this cognitive dimension; other processes are involved such as attention, speed processing, motor speed, or working memory.…”

“…The literature is inconsistent concerning this dimension, with some studies showing an impairment [11,17,20,24,25,31,34,35,52•] while others do not [8,13,15,18,19,21,30,37,50,56,62,63]. shows that the slowdown characterizing OCD patients does not explain this impairment.…”

Executive Functions of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and Panic Disorder Patients in Comparison to Healty Controls

“…There are studies demonstrating the impairment in this function in patients with OCD (6,7,8,9). On the other hand, there are also studies published that conclude that there are no impairments of set-shifting in OCD (10,11,12,13). In 9 of the 19 studies examining fluency, which is another executive function, the OCD group displayed similar performance to healthy controls and in 7 of those studies, patients with OCD performed significantly poorer than healthy controls (14).…”