Symptom Structure in Japanese Patients With Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

Abstract

OBJECTIVE: Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) comprises a number of specific symptom dimensions. The authors factor analyzed data on the Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale symptom checklist in a large group of Japanese OCD patients to examine whether symptom dimensions were stable across cultures. METHOD: A principal components analysis of Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale major symptom categories was performed on Japanese OCD patients (N=343). The association between symptom dimensions and clinical variables, including 1-year outcome after combination treatment, was also examined using Pearson correlations. RESULTS: Four factors explaining 57.7% of the variance were identified: 1) contamination/washing, 2) hoarding, 3) symmetry/repeating and ordering, and 4) aggressive/checking symptoms. The symmetry dimension was associated with early age at onset, and both the symmetry and hoarding dimensions were associated with decreased functioning and treatment resistance. CONCLUSIONS: The findings in this study support transcultural stability in the symptom structure of OCD, which is consistent with the hypothesis that OCD is mediated by universal psychobiological mechanisms.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 100 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.