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| |  Young Children Less Likely to Report Obsessions Than Teens: Presented at AACAP By Maria Bishop BOSTON, MA -- November 1, 2007 -- Children between the ages of 5 and 7 years are less likely to report psychiatric obsessions than are adolescents, according to research presented here at the 54th Annual Meeting of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry (AACAP). Determining which symptom categories for OCD are most prevalent in the different phases of childhood and adolescence may have important implications for assessment and treatment, noted Noah Berman, BA, Pediatric Anxiety Research Clinic/Rhode Island Hospital/Brown Medical School, Providence, Rhode Island, United States. According to the researchers, no previous study has systematically assessed the developmental variability of OCD symptom characteristics or number of OCD symptom characteristics across paediatric age groups. In this study, 192 children ages 5 through 17 years attended a paediatric anxiety research clinic where they participated in formalised clinical interviews and received a diagnosis of OCD; 52% were females, 91% were Caucasian. Clinicians assessed subjects' symptom categories using the structure of the Child Yale-Brown Obsessive-Compulsive Scale (CYBOS). The presence and absence of obsessions and compulsions was assessed. Three subgroups were created, based on age: 5- to 7-year olds (early childhood); 8- to 11-year olds (middle childhood); and 12- to 17-year olds (adolescence). Those in early childhood reported fewer of the following CYBOS obsession categories as revealed by Chi-square analyses: contaminations, sexual, magical, moral and miscellaneous obsessions. Chi square analysis also revealed significant differences between the adolescent cohort and both other cohorts for washing/cleaning compulsions and superstitious compulsions. In analysis of variance testing, the number of obsessions increased with age. Clinicians may relay more on parent reports in young children, which would consequently limit the number of obsessions, Mr. Berman noted. "A different measure that does not relay as much on verbal report may be helpful to more systematically assess the obsessions of young children," he stated. In the future, this research team hopes to evaluate the degree to which OCD severity may play a role in obsessive and compulsive symptoms at varying developmental levels.
[Presentation title: Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Symptom Category Differences in Children: Abstract A48]
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