Saccadic abnormalities in psychotropic-naive obsessive-compulsive disorder without co-morbidity

Nic J. van der Wee, Hans H. Hardeman, Nick F. Ramsey, Mathijs Raemaekers, Harold J. van Megen, Damiaan A. Denys, Herman G. Westenberg, René S. Kahn

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26 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Oculomotor studies have found saccadic abnormalities in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), lending support for models postulating a central role for inhibition in OCD. Saccadic abnormalities in OCD may also be potential candidates for a biological marker, important for more endophenotype-oriented research. Saccadic abnormalities have not been examined in psychotropic-naive patients with OCD without co-morbidity. METHOD: We compared the error rates and latencies of 14 carefully selected adult psychotropic-naive patients with OCD with no co-morbid diagnosis and 14 pairwise matched healthy controls on a fixation task, on a prosaccade task and on an antisaccade task. RESULTS: Patients with OCD showed normal error rates on all tasks, but latencies on the antisaccade task were significantly increased. CONCLUSIONS: Our results indicate that patients with OCD have no gross impairment of oculomotor inhibitory capacities, but may have a disturbed capacity to deliberately initiate a saccade to an imagined target
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1321-1326
JournalPsychological Medicine
Volume36
Issue number9
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2006

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