TY  - JOUR
A1  - Vigne, Paula
A1  - Simões, Bruno F. T.
A1  - B. de Menezes, Gabriela
A1  - Fortes, Pedro P.
A1  - Dias, Rafaela V.
A1  - Laurito, Luana D.
A1  - Loureiro, Carla P.
A1  - Moreira-de-Oliveira, Maria Eduarda
A1  - Albertella, Lucy
A1  - Lee, Rico S. C.
A1  - Stangier, Ulrich
A1  - Fontenelle, Leonardo F.
T1  - The relationship between obsessive-compulsive disorder and anxiety disorders: A question of diagnostic boundaries or simply severity of symptoms?
T2  - Comprehensive psychiatry
N2  - Background: A growing number of studies are questioning the validity of current DSM diagnoses, either as "discrete" or distinct mental disorders and/or as phenotypically homogeneous syndromes. In this study, we investigated how symptom domains in patients with a main diagnosis of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), panic disorder (PD) and social anxiety disorder (SAD) coaggregate. We predicted that symptom domains would be unrelated to DSM diagnostic categories and less likely to cluster with each other as severity increases.
Methods: One-hundred eight treatment seeking patients with a main diagnosis of OCD, SAD or PD were assessed with the Dimensional Obsessive-Compulsive Scale (DOCS), the Social Phobia Inventory (SPIN), the Panic and Agoraphobia Scale (PAS), the Anxiety Sensitivity Index-Revised (ASI-R), and the Beck Depression and Anxiety Inventories (BDI and BAI, respectively). Subscores generated by each scale (herein termed "symptom domains") were used to categorize individuals into mild, moderate and severe subgroups through K-means clusterization and subsequently analysed by means of multiple correspondence analysis.
Results: Broadly, we observed that symptom domains of OCD, SAD or PD tend to cluster on the basis of their severities rather than their DSM diagnostic labels. In particular, symptom domains and disorders were grouped into (1) a single mild "neurotic" syndrome characterized by multiple, closely related and co-occurring mild symptom domains; (2) two moderate (complicated and uncomplicated) "neurotic" syndromes (the former associated with panic disorder); and (3) severe but dispersed "neurotic" symptom domains.
Conlusion: Our findings suggest that symptoms domains of treatment seeking patients with OCD and anxiety disorders tend to be better conceptualized in terms of severity rather than rigid diagnostic boundaries.
KW  - Severity of symptoms
KW  - General neurotic syndrome
KW  - Neuroticism
KW  - Anxiety sensitivity
KW  - Obsessive–compulsive disorder
KW  - Social anxiety disorder
KW  - Panic disorder
Y1  - 2019
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/53574
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-535749
SN  - 1532-8384
SN  - 0010-440X
N1  - © 2019 Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).
VL  - 94
IS  - Art. 152116
SP  - 1
EP  - 6
PB  - Elsevier
CY  - Amsterdam [u. a.]
ER  -