1. ¹Department of Psychiatry, School of Medicine, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA
2. ²Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, USA
3. ³Veterans Affairs Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System, Los Angeles, CA, USA
4. ⁴Department of Radiology, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Correspondence: Dr S Saxena, UCSD Obsessive-Compulsive Disorders Program, Department of Psychiatry, VA San Diego Healthcare System, 3350 La Jolla Village Drive, San Diego, CA 92161, USA. E-mail: ssaxena@ucsd.edu

Received 23 February 2007; Revised 14 September 2007; Accepted 21 September 2007; Published online 8 January 2008.

Abstract

Brief intensive cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) using exposure and response prevention significantly improves obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) symptoms in as little as 4 weeks. However, it has been thought that much longer treatment was needed to produce the changes in brain function seen in neuroimaging studies of OCD. We sought to elucidate the brain mediation of response to brief intensive CBT for OCD and determine whether this treatment could induce functional brain changes previously seen after longer trials of pharmacotherapy or standard CBT. [¹⁸F]-fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography brain scans were obtained on 10 OCD patients before and after 4 weeks of intensive individual CBT. Twelve normal controls were scanned twice, several weeks apart, without treatment. Regional glucose metabolic changes were compared between groups. OCD symptoms, depression, anxiety and overall functioning improved robustly with treatment. Significant changes in normalized regional glucose metabolism were seen after brief intensive CBT (P=0.04). Compared to controls, OCD patients showed significant bilateral decreases in normalized thalamic metabolism with intensive CBT but had a significant increase in right dorsal anterior cingulate cortex activity that correlated strongly with the degree of improvement in OCD symptoms (P=0.02). The rapid response of OCD to intensive CBT is mediated by a distinct pattern of changes in regional brain function. Reduction of thalamic activity may be a final common pathway for improvement in OCD, but response to intensive CBT may require activation of dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, a region involved in reappraisal and suppression of negative emotions.