OCD is a mental health condition in which a person has obsessive thoughts and compulsive behaviours. Nearly 90 per cent of young people with OCD have problems at school, home or socially, including difficulties doing homework and concentrating at school.
A team of researchers, led by Dr Julia Gottwald and Professor Barbara Sahakian from the University of Cambridge’s Department of Psychiatry, asked 36 adolescents with OCD and 36 healthy young people to complete a series of learning and memory tasks. They found that youngsters with OCD experienced problems in all the tasks.
“I was surprised and concerned to see such broad problems of learning and memory in these young people so early in the course of OCD,” said Prof Sahakian, the study’s senior author.
“It will be important to follow this study up to examine these cognitive problems further and in particular to determine how they impact on clinical symptoms and school performance.”
Experiencing learning and memory problems at school can undoubtedly affect youngsters’ self esteem. Added to this, symptoms such as compulsive checking may be a result of them having reduced confidence in their memory ability.
Consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist Dr Anna Conway Morris said that the findings of this study had already been useful in helping young people with OCD to receive the help they needed at school to realise their potential.
“One person with OCD was able to obtain good A levels and to be accepted by a good university where she could get the support that she needed in order to do well in that environment,” she said.
- The study, Impaired cognitive plasticity and goal-directed control in adolescent obsessive compulsive disorder, is published in the journal Psychological Medicine. Visit http://bit.ly/2DJNwW9