What Have We Learned from Brain Imaging of OCD Patients?

What Have We Learned from Brain Imaging of OCD Patients? (1:05)

Brain imaging has uncovered some understanding of obsessive compulsive disorder. Wayne Goodman, MD, chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, explains what we've learned about OCD from brain scanning.

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[MUSIC] The brain imaging studies of OCD have been very revealing and consistent. In fact some of the most consistent findings using brain imaging or in the area OCD and Psychiatry, there seems to be a particular circuit that mediates the symptoms of OCD then involves area of the frontal cortex and some more primitive areas of the brain basal ganglia.

And those area seem to be hyperactive when patients are symptomatic and it's interesting whether you treat them with medications or behavior therapy that over activation seems to subside. We think we understand the circuit that mediates OCD symptoms, but we still don't know what causes it in the first place.

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