People with obsessive-compulsive disorder have an imbalance of brain chemicals – our discovery could mean a treatment breakthrough

• But OCD is actually a severe and disabling disorder characterised by obsessions – recurrent intrusive thoughts, impulses or images that are unwanted and anxiety provoking.
• Some people with OCD are engaged in rituals for much of their waking life and cannot even leave their homes.
• But in our new research, published in Nature Communications, we discovered an imbalance in brain chemicals in OCD that could lead to radically different and improved treatments.
• Scientists have suspected that this involves an imbalance between chemical messengers, or neurotransmitters, called
  glutamate and gamma-aminobutyric acid (Gaba) in certain brain regions.

Magnetic resonance spectroscopy

• To study glutamate and Gaba, we used a high-strength magnet (called 7-Tesla) to perform magnetic resonance spectroscopy.
• This helps scientists to measure what kind of chemicals exist there – and their concentration.
• This allowed us to detect and measure glutamate and Gaba levels separately in different brain regions.
• Importantly, the clinical severity of compulsive symptoms of OCD correlated with the glutamate levels we measured in the SMA.

Future treatments

• The finding raises hopes for better treatments for OCD, focusing on re-balancing glutamate and Gaba levels in key brain regions.
• In patients with extremely severe OCD, for whom all other usual treatments have failed, surgeons have actually removed the ACC.
• And for less severely impaired patients where such drastic treatments are not justified, there may be therapeutic possibilities of using “transcranial magnetic stimulation”.
• In future, if OCD is diagnosed early in the course of the illness – and the chemical imbalance we have discovered is also detected – then these new treatments offer hope for improved quality of life and wellbeing for patients the disorder.