Original articlesError-related hyperactivity of the anterior cingulate cortex in obsessive-compulsive disorder
Section snippets
Subjects
Eight OCD patients (two female patients; age: 27.4 ± 8.5 years; education: 15.5 ± 2.4 years) and seven healthy control subjects (two female control subjects; age: 30.0 ± 8.6 years; education: 16.9 ± 1.7 years) were evaluated using the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV (SCID) (First et al 1996), the Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale (Y-BOCS) (Goodman et al 1989), and the Hamilton Depression Scale (HAM-D). Among the patients, there were no current comorbid diagnoses. Patients with a
Behavioral results
Accuracy rates (mean proportion correct ± SD) were relatively high for both the comparison subjects (SCOMP: .98 ± .02; RCOMP: .99 ± .01; INCOMP: .94 ± .04) and the OCD patients (SCOMP: .93 ± .09; RCOMP: .93 ± .09; INCOMP: .86 ± .14). There was a significant effect of condition [F(2,26) = 12.7, p = .0001] on accuracy but no effect of subject type (p = .16) and no interaction (p = .41). Response latencies (mean ± SD) were similar for the groups, with patients nominally faster (OCD: SCOMP: 553 ±
Discussion
Obsessive-compulsive disorder patients and healthy comparison subjects performed a simple cognitive task in which fMRI BOLD signal localized neural responses to errors. In line with predictions that OCD involves overactive error processing, significantly greater error-related activity occurred in the ACC (specifically, the rACC) in the OCD group. These results are consistent with event-related electrophysiological studies in this patient population (Gehring et al 2000; Hajcak and Simons 2002;
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