Understanding the OCD Brain part 1: OCD and me

My name is David Adam. I'm a journalist and I have obsessive-compulsive disorder. Lots of people say oh I'm a bit OCD but unless you have it it's almost impossible to comprehend just how severe and crippling a condition it is. OCD can make people wash their hands for hours bleach until they're red raw. It can maybe we'll check the front door is locked 20, 30, 40 times before they leave the house or maybe stop them leaving the house at all. My own OCD is around HIV and AIDS. From the moment that I woke up until the time I would go to sleep, I was consumed by repetitive, irrational thoughts about how I might have caught the disease. So I lived to that years and it was only really when I started to involve my daughter in my rituals and project some of my fears onto her that, I went for help. I was lucky a combination of medication and the counseling that I received helped me keep my condition under control. When I started to feel a bit better I think I reacted like a journalist probably would and I wanted to know more and to write about what had happened. I wrote a book about my own experiences which with OCD and the science and the history of it but one of the things that I didn't really address was the use of animals to research the condition. I think that's because I thought well what can an animal's brain even a monkey's brain tell us about what goes on inside a human. I've been invited to the University of Cambridge to meet Professor Trevor Robbins, a world expert on the science behind OCD. He's offered to take me behind closed doors to see how his team studies the disorder. OCD of course is a psychiatric disorder which consists of obsessions that's thinking the same thing over and over again, often worrying about it and compulsions which is doing the same thing over and over again to no good effect. Actually it's useless actually it's incredibly disruptive of your life. This is a very severe disorder and understanding it is absolutely vital for the future of psychiatry. So two structures in particular in the brain which seem to be involved in OCD are the frontal lobes and they're what here? They're all over here they're huge in humans as you know and the frontal lobes are composed of many different areas which have different functions. These are some of the most mysterious parts of the brain and it's only gradually that we're becoming to appreciate and understand their functions. The frontal lobes have very important roles in controlling this very important set of structures and in the it's like a fist in the hand of the brain. This is this would be the cortex including the frontal lobes and this some of these structures are called the basal ganglia and they go wrong in conditions like Parkinson's and Huntington's but they've also been implicated in addiction and also in OCD. And somehow it looks to us as though the relationships between these structures the frontal lobes and the basal ganglia are changed in OCD. Now there may also be some chemical changes associated with this because there are chemical messengers which modulate the functions of these structures according to our moods, our stress state and so-forth. These include substance things like dopamine and serotonin and one of the treatments as you know that's been used in OCD is to boost serotonin which to be honest has not been that successful but it may help some patients. Also dopamine, it's been suggested to be too active in some patients and so some drugs which antagonise the effects are definitely have been helpful in some severe cases. As you know the other ways of treating OCD are the talking treatments CBT and also rather radically the deep brain stimulation which is as you know only used very severe cases which again does depend on affecting the circuitry of these structures in very particular ways. So we see the symptoms of OCD in humans how do you recreate or model these in in animas.l Well the main symptoms of course are the obsessions obsessional thoughts which are very hard to model directly in animals because they can't talk to us but you can measure the compulsions, the behaviours that occur repetitively and in a very disruptive fashion to ruin these people's lives. You can actually do that in a very simple way in the genetic models OCD in the mouse. So some of these mice that have an abnormal protein in the basal ganglia groom themselves compulsively to a degree where they cause skin lesions, damage themselves which is obviously not good but it's very parallel to we've seen some patients without she calls lesions for their hands. So that's a very direct example another example be checking behaviour. So patients may check the repetitively whether they've locked the door and this is incredibly disruptive if they spend an hour to doing that, they're late for work - lose their job. And you can measure checking excessive checking in animals in very clever ways but you could also get also some of the thinking possibly no CD which you can infer from studying the behaviour of OCD patients and animals. So you can present animals with situations where they have to show flexibility in their responding, in their attending to the world. You change the situation and in fact you can use more or less the same test in animals and humans and show that patients with OCD are also bad and flexibly adjusting to changes in the world in a similar way to animals but the differences- in the experimental animal were able to understand the mechanisms by which this rigidity occurs which we can't in humans because we can't use interventional techniques to test the causality of the involvement of that area in thinking or behaviour. During the next film I look at how Cambridge researchers are studying OCD using animals- the laboratory rat more controversially, a small species of monkey known as a marmoset.

Channel: Cambridge University

Views: 58,001

Rating: 4.8629689 out of 5

Keywords: Cambridge University, University of Cambridge, David Adam, OCD, Cambridge research, Animal research, BUAV, treatments for OCD, science behind OCD, The Animal Scientific Procedures Act, Animal research and testing, Understanding Animal Research, Animal experimentation, Animals used in research, Animal research ethics, Concordat on Openness on Animal Research, experiments on primates, primate research, PETA, understanding the OCD brain, #mentalhealthawareness

Id: YpCOAqxbfpA

Length: 7min 32sec (452 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 28 2017