Mice With OCD Can Mean New Hope for Humans

[n2doc]

By Jeffrey Kluger
June 07, 2013


There may be no torment quite like the sublime looniness that is obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Your hands are clean, the door is locked, you didn’t insult a colleague at work or drive over someone on the way home or mishear the 17 doctors you’ve seen in the past month who told you that no, you really, truly don’t have whatever disease you think you’ve got. And yet you keep washing or locking or checking or worrying.

Most people think they understand OCD — and most people are wrong. It’s not just tidiness, it’s not just fretfulness, and it’s not a glib adjective (“You should see how neat my desk is. I’m so OCD!”). It is, instead, a profound malfunction in various regions of the brain — principally the amygdala, which processes fear, anxiety and other primal emotions — and the mere fact that it is exceedingly treatable with cognitive-behavioral therapy, medication or both does not make it any less awful if you’ve got a real case of it. Now, thanks to a new study just published in Science, people suffering with OCD have at least a little more hope of recovery than they did before — and people studying the disorder have a lot more insight into what causes it in the first place.

The fact that OCD can be expressed in so many different ways has always suggested that it is caused by idiosyncratic interactions among several different brain regions. The amygdala likely plays a role in all of them, but the best-known forms of OCD — contamination anxiety and the excessive washing that can follow — are thought to be governed by the orbital frontal cortex (OFC) and the ventromedial striatum (VMS). The OFC governs decisionmaking and volitional activity; the VMS governs how we experience fear and risk. It’s not hard to see how an alarm set off by the VMS can lead to a decision to wash by the OFC — even if that decision defies reason.



Read more: http://science.time.com/2013/06/07/mice-with-ocd-can-mean-new-hope-for-humans/

[leftyladyfrommo]

1. I have OCD

It can be just awful if it gets very bad. I check things - over and over and over. It flared up really bad a couple of years ago and I was afraid I would not be able to work.

It's a hard thing to explain to people. I work as a pet sitter. I could get into the houses and get everything done but then I couldn't get back out. I would start checking everything over and over and over. I would think I had it and would leave and would then have to go back and start rechecking and rechecking.

It is just exhausting.

I started taking Prozac and that knocked it out. I had to stay on kind of a high dose for almost a year - and that isn't much fun. But it eventually straightened itself out and now I am doing just fine. I don't take the medication any more. And the OCD is still there but it's not nearly as bad and I can control the compulsions.

Some people wash their hands 60 times a day. Some people can't quit cleaning so they can't leave the house. Some people have to go back and check to be sure they didn't kill someone everytime they hit a bump in the road. It is just awful. And it completely ruins your life if it gets out of control.