The Epidemiology of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder in the National Comorbidity Survey Replication

By A. M. Ruscio, Dan J Stein, W. Chiu, Ronald C. Kessler. Molecular Psychiatry, 2008

2,573 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Despite significant advances in the study of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), important questions remain about the disorder's public health significance, appropriate diagnostic classification, and clinical heterogeneity. These issues were explored using data from the National Comorbidity Survey Replication, a nationally representative survey of US adults. A subsample of 2073 respondents was assessed for lifetime Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th edn (DSM-IV) OCD. More than one quarter of respondents reported experiencing obsessions or compulsions at some time in their lives. While conditional probability of OCD was strongly associated with the number of obsessions and compulsions reported, only small proportions of respondents met full DSM-IV criteria for lifetime (2.3%) or 12-month (1.2%) OCD. OCD is associated with substantial comorbidity, not only with anxiety and mood disorders but also with impulse-control and substance use disorders. Severity of OCD, assessed by an adapted version of the Yale–Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale, is associated with poor insight, high comorbidity, high role impairment, and high probability of seeking treatment. The high prevalence of subthreshold OCD symptoms may help explain past inconsistencies in prevalence estimates across surveys and suggests that the public health burden of OCD may be greater than its low prevalence implies. Evidence of a preponderance of early onset cases in men, high comorbidity with a wide range of disorders, and reliable associations between disorder severity and key outcomes may have implications for how OCD is classified in DSM-V.

Subfields: Clinical Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7af583ad46cc8f26e3a12fbf304ee367cf6d1bef

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Clinical Psychology

1. Hans-Ulrich Wittchen
2. Ronald C. Kessler
3. A. M. Ruscio
4. Derek Richards
5. Matthew K. Nock

In Experimental and Cognitive Psychology

1. A. M. Ruscio
2. Hans-Ulrich Wittchen
3. K. Shear
4. Ronald C. Kessler

Citations in the corpus

• Epidemiology of anxiety disorders. (2010, background): “As noted above, epidemiological surveys consistently find that OCD is one of the least prevalent anxiety disorders, with lifetime prevalence estimates consistently less than 3% (Ruscio et al. 2008).”
• Sex differences in anxiety and depression clinical perspectives (2014, background): “2% and lifetime rates are 2–3% (Kessler et al., 2005; Ruscio et al., 2010), with a similar prevalence internationally (Weissman et al.”
• Canadian clinical practice guidelines for the management of anxiety, posttraumatic stress and obsessive-compulsive disorders (2014, background): “few new cases after the early 30s [2,641,643].”