OCD in Adulthood & Childhood

OCD in Adulthood Traced to Cues in Childhood

By Kurt Ullman, Contributing Writer, MedPage Today Published: December 30, 2011 Reviewed by Zalman S. Agus, MD; Emeritus Professor University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine.

Rituals and sensory hypersensitivities in a child may be early warning signs of adult obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), according to the results of two studies from Israel. A strong reaction to everyday events as recorded on a sensory profile was highly correlated with ritualism on the Childhood Routine Inventory (CRI) in one study (r=0.68, P<0.001), reported Reuven Dar, PhD, and colleagues from Tel Aviv University. In the second study, recollected oral and tactile hypersensitivity was positively correlated with symptoms measured by the Obsessive-Compulsive Inventory-Revised (OCI-R) scales (r=0.34,P<0.001). Adult hypersensitivity in both areas was positively correlated with all six of the inventory subscales. None of the differences between the various correlation coefficients was significant. The findings appeared in the March 2012 issue of the Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry./.../