Using brain imaging to understand the developmental basis of obsessive-compulsive disorder
Investigators will use functional imaging of young patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder to ask if the brain’s error-processing circuits develop abnormally in this disorder.
Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a common and disabling psychiatric illness characterized by intrusive, anxiety-provoking thoughts and ritualistic, repetitive behaviors. The disorder often begins in childhood or adolescence, raising the possibility that it results from atypical brain maturation. Because OCD symptoms are usually associated with the nagging sense that a mistake has been made, researchers suspect a problem in the development of the brain’s error-detecting circuitry.
One brain region in particular whose development may go awry in OCD is the rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC). This area is responsible for generating emotional responses to performance errors. Normally, the rACC operates in balance with more “cognitive” prefrontal cortical areas that are responsible for checking errors and monitoring performance. In OCD, however, the rACC appears to be hyperactive, so that emotional responses to possible errors may no longer be held in check by the brain’s prefrontal areas. The University of Michigan investigators hypothesize that this hyperactivity of the rACC occurs because the structure develops too early or too much. The prefrontal areas that normally regulate the rACC then fail to catch up with it developmentally, resulting in a chronic imbalance between emotional and cognitive responses to error. The investigators will test this hypothesis using functional MRI (fMRI), which generates images of the activity of different brain regions while patients perform specific cognitive tasks that tend to produce errors. The investigators will perform the fMRI experiments in 48 pediatric OCD patients and 48 healthy volunteers at different developmental stages (pre-pubertal, pubertal, and adolescent), and compare rates of maturation of error-processing circuits in the two groups.
Significance: Mapping the activity of brain circuits in OCD as the disorder evolves may enable the generation of new treatment strategies tailored to specific developmental stages.
Learn more:
Psychiatry Affective Neuroimaging Laboratory
Kate Fitzgerald Honored with Dana Foundation Grant for Neuroimaging
Participate in OCD Research: Brain development in children and adolescents with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder