Compulsive disorders Flashcards
What is a compulsive disorder?
- Involves abnormal, repetitive behavior resulting from anxiety or stress without an apparent inciting trigger and when other physical or behavioral causes have been ruled out
- Difficult to disrupt
- May be self-reinforcing and difficult to interrupt without physical intervention
- often disrupts daily functions due to the intensity and frequency
- The diagnosis for 2-5% of patients seen by veterinary behaviorists
- May actually be higher number as thought to be under-reported
- Owners often don’t seek help until symptoms are severe
What are the clinical characteristics of Compulsive disorders?
- Categories for dogs are very diverse range of behavior
- Locomotor
- Visual/hallucinatory
- Oral
- Self-directed
-
Breed predilections
- Flank-sucking Dobermans
- Altered function in the subcortical region of the brain
- Flank-sucking Dobermans
- Affects serotonergic and dopaminergic regions
- Affected dogs have lower serotonin-receptor binding
What are the Locomotor Compulsive Behaviors?
- Circling/spinning
- Tail chasing
- Pacing
What are the visual/hallucinatory compulsive Disorders?
- Light or shadow-chasing
- Fly snappers
What are the oral compulsive disorders?
- Pica
- Licking
What are the self-directed or self-injurious compulsive disorders?
- Flank sucking
- Hind checking
- Acral like dermatitis
What is the Pathophysiology of Compulsive Disorders?
- Likely multifactorial
- Learning
- can be part of the inciting cause and perpetuation of CD
- Owners may inadvertently reinforce
- Over time, the behavior becomes so engrained that it continues, even the inciting cause is no longer there
What are the history and clinical signs of compulsive disorders?
- Symptoms in dogs often start prior to a year of age
- Median <1 year for tail chasing and flank sucking
- Median >1 year for acral lick dermatitis
- Owners often don’t present dogs until they are older for treatment
- Concurrent behavioral issues often present in 75% of dogs with CD
- Separation anxiety
- Aggression
- Generalized anxiety
- Attention seeking disorders
How are compulsive disorders diagnosed?
- Diagnosis of exclusion
- PE and diagnostic testing may show abnormalities secondary to behaviors associated with chronic CD
-
A thorough history is needed
- Description/video of the behavior
- Initiating factors
- Situations where behavior will likely occur
- Owner response
- Attempted treatments and success
- Behavior history forms are useful
Are all repetitive behaviors compulsive?
- NO
- alternative causes must be ruled out
What is displacement behavior?
- Normal behavior displayed at inappropriate times, or out of context, in response to anxiety-provoking events
- EX: dog licking paw when alone
- Occurs during stressful situations
- Remains linked to the anxiety-provoking situation
- Can evolve into CD with repetition or additional stress
What are differential diagnosis for repetitive behavior?
- Displacement behavior
- Redirected behavior
- Vacuum activity
- Stereotypy
- Audience-responsive behavior
What is redirected behavior?
- Behavior incited by one target but directed at another
- EX:
- Pruritic dog that licks inside of an Elizabethan collar when it cannot lick itself
What is Vacuum activity?
- Behavior performed in absence of normal stimuli required for that behavior
- Ex:
- Border collie that runs laps when not exercised
What is stereotypy?
- Repetitive, unvarying behavior with no apparent goal or function displayed by captive animals lacking appropriate enrichment or outlets
- EX:
- Dog confined to a small kennel without toys or social contact that jumps on the door in an invariant pattern
What is Audience-responsive behavior?
- Operant-conditioned behavior performed to solicit interaction with humans and in the presence of a human and has past reinforcement
- Ex:
- Light-chasing dog that stops when owner leaves and has historically been offered a toy when it chased lights
What are the Key components of Management and Treatment of Compulsive Disorders?
- Client education
- Minimizing repetitive behavior
- Reinforcing alternative behaviors
- Alleviating patient stress
How does Client education affect Compulsive disorders?
- Punishment based training
- Can increase aggression
- Can increase likelihood o injury
- Can increase anxiety
- Exacerbate CD
- Educated owners are less likely to use punishment-based training when they are informed that CD is due to anxiety and NOT due to dominance behavior of lack of training
How does Minimizing Repetitive Behavior affect Compulsive Disorders?
- Treatment should focus on behavior prevention
- The more a dog performs the repetitive behavior, the more ingrained it becomes
- Pet owners should try to identify situations that invoke compulsive behavior and try to avoid them
- Owners need to prevent unintentional reinforcement
- Don’t provide or take away positive reinforcements while the repetitive behavior is occurring
How dos Reinforcing Alternative Behaviors affect Compulsive Disorders?
- Dogs should be taught an alterative behavior that can be cued or reinforced whenever repetitive behavior is likely to occur
- Dogs that pace
- try to get them to fetch
- Shadow Chasers
- reward for lying down with chin on the floor
- Pica behavior
- feed from puzzle toys
- Owners should use cue-response-reinforcement patterns
- Give a cue
- God needs to respond
- Give a treat/toy/praise if responds appropriately
- When undesirable behavior is demonstrated
- Attention should be withdrawn
- Dogs that pace