Week 8: Studying Trauma and OCD
Hello, everyone!
It has been quite awhile since I last posted, and it feels good to be back! I mentioned previously that I began researching a new research gap prior to my spring break and will now fill you in on the progress I made in the past few days.
Up until now, I have been focusing very heavily on the neuroscience aspect of OCD, but as part of studying psychotherapies, I looked into another factor that heavily impacts OCD: trauma. I read two articles which explored the effect of trauma on patients with OCD, with one focusing on PTSD specifically and the other on childhood trauma. I did not plan to go extremely in-depth into this factor, but I wanted to cover it somewhat comprehensively and chose to study trauma from two different points in life.
In the first article, Wadsworth et al. (2021) described that OCD often has a comorbidity with PTSD and patients will have a higher treatment resistance due to the relationship between each disorder’s symptoms. The order of onset significantly influences OCD symptom severity such that patients will likely have more severe symptoms if OCD develops at the same time as or after PTSD. OCD and PTSD symptoms also appear to be interconnected by possibly maintaining each other as a way to avoid triggers both for obsessions and traumatic memories. Due to the overlapping symptoms, the authors noted that different therapies designed to treat one disorder may be detrimental to the other; however, they can also aid in teaching skills applicable to both to some extent. For example, Prolonged Exposure is a therapy where patients recall traumatic memories and emotions and are prevented from avoiding them, which is similar to ERP and may help patients seek ERP as a treatment for OCD (Wadsworth et al., 2021). Unfortunately, the connection between PTSD and OCD symptoms are still not entirely clear, and additional research is needed to create effective treatment plans.
Boger et al. (2020) explored the impact of childhood trauma on OCD patients and found that the majority of OCD patients reported experiencing childhood trauma with higher severity and that more severe trauma lead to greater OCD symptom severity as well. This higher symptom severity also remained after treatment, although the authors did not find any correlation between childhood trauma and treatment outcome. Specific subtypes of trauma may also affect symptom severity differently; however, no definitive conclusion was reached due to a lack of data. The authors also controlled for other factors, such as stress, anxiety, depression, and PTSD, to verify the correlation between trauma and OCD symptoms, determining that stress appears to affect it the most. I found it interesting that the study mentioned that all the participants had high symptom severity yet childhood trauma did not affect treatment outcome as it seemed to cause more severe symptoms.
These studies provide more insight into the influence of different forms of trauma on OCD, but more studies must be conducted to understand the true impact it has. Learning about how crucial trauma is in OCD development added a new level of understanding for me that I intend to include into my final product design.
I hope you enjoyed reading my post, and I will see you all next week!
Wadsworth, L. P., Van Kirk, N., August, M., Kelly, J. M., Jackson, F., Nelson, J., & Luehrs, R. (2021). Understanding the overlap between OCD and trauma: Development of the OCD trauma timeline interview (OTTI) for clinical settings. Current Psychology, 42(9), 6937–6947. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-021-02118-3
Boger, S., Ehring, T., Berberich, G., & Werner, G. G. (2020). Impact of childhood maltreatment on obsessive-compulsive disorder symptom severity and treatment outcome. European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 11(1), 1753942. https://doi.org/10.1080/20008198.2020.1753942
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