OCD Symptoms and Features Flashcards
Name 3 symptoms of OCD
- Obsessions (repetitive thoughts) causes anxiety or distress if they are ignored.
- Compulsive (repetitive) behaviours, such as excessively washing the hands and carried out for more than an hour a day.
- Intrusive repetitive thoughts about the obsession.
Name 3 features of OCD
- OCD-UK (2017) estimates that 1.2% of the UK population experience OCD at any time.
- Lifetime prevalence is 2.3% (Ruscio et al 2010), affects males and females equally.
- Bimodal distribution of onset - some cases appear around 10 years of age and another peak at around 21 (Menon 2013).
A strength of the reliability of OCD diagnosis has been demonstrated but by whom?
Lopez-Pina et al (2015) conducted a meta-analysis of 144 studies using the Y-BOCS scale.
They found very high values +0.866 for coefficient alpha, (a measure of internal consistency) and +0.848 for test retest correlations (same person tested again after a reasonable time interval).
These high values show that diagnosis using the Y-BOCS is reliable.
A weakness is that the diagnosis may lack validity but why?
Diagnosis may be biased because people don’t give honest answers in questionnaires about their obsessive/compulsive symptoms.
This means that a questionnaire may not be measuring what it intended to measure, reducing the validity of diagnosis.
Comorbidity is an important issue for the validity of diagnosis.
Name two studies that investigated OCD and other conditions.
Rosenfield et al (2012) found that people diagnosed with OCD had higher Y-BOCS scores than those with other anxiety disorders and normal controls.
Woody et al (1995) found that OCD was often diagnosed alongside depression.
Comorbid conditions make it difficult to decide on the best treatment.