People with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) have less grey matter in the region of the brain 'that is important in suppressing responses and habits', reported BBC News. 'Brain scans might be able to reveal which people are at genetic risk of developing obsessive compulsive disorder,' the BBC added.
The Sun also reports on the study, but focuses on the finding that immediate family members of people with OCD, who themselves do not have the disorder, perform worse on ability tests and have similar deficits in grey matter. This is 'the first time a genetic link has been found', and people with OCD 'may inherit the condition from their families', the newspaper said.
The study is well-conducted, but whether OCD could be diagnosed using a brain scan remains to be seen. Currently, the condition is diagnosed using a clinical history of the person having certain distressing "obsessions" and "compulsions" that are significant enough to interfere with normal function for a certain period of time every day (usually greater than one hour). The number of people included in this study was small and only people with particular OCD symptoms were included. This limits whether the results can be applied to all OCD sufferers and their families.
Where did the story come from?
Dr Lara Menzies and colleagues from the Brain Mapping Unit at the University of Cambridge and other medical institutes in Cambridge carried out this research. The study was funded by the National Alliance for Research on Schizophrenia and Depression, the Wellcome Trust, the Hartnett Fund, the Medical Research Council and the National Institutes of Mental Health and Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering. It was published in the peer-reviewed medical journal: Brain.
What kind of scientific study was this?
This was a cross-sectional study where the researchers were investigating possible 'endophenotypes' of OCD. OCD is known to be an inheritable disease, but because of the difficulty of identifying genes that may cause it, another approach is to look for 'endophenotypes' measurable physical characteristics (such as differences in brain structure in this case) which suggest how the disease might be inherited.
