Cognitive electroencephalographic potentials evoked by words as markers of the severity of the pathology and resistance to treatment in obsessive-compulsive disorder.
Résumé
Patients suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) show an attentional bias towards pathology-related words. Electroencephalographic cognitive potentials were used to investigate how patients responded to words related to their obsessions and compulsions. Forty OCD patients with various levels of severity and treatmentresistance were included to assess links between word-evoked potentials and patients’ clinical variables, and compared with 40 control participants. The P200 component evoked by both neutral and pathology-related words was greater in patients than in controls, suggesting that patients were more attentive overall. In the N400 time window, pathology-related words evoked less negative potentials than neutral words in OCD patients, suggesting that pathology-related words were particularly familiar to them and permanently pre-activated in their mental lexicon. Finally, correlations were detected between pathology severity and the profile of wordevoked potentials in the N400 time window, and between the patients’ treatment resistance and the amplitudeof late word-evoked positive potentials (P600).
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