Symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder in a sample of Iranian patients

Characteristic features of the obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) occur with remarkable consistency in different cultural settings. The content of symptoms, however, seems to vary across cultures.

To examine the content of symptoms in a sample of OCD patients from Iran.

In a sample of 135 patients recruited from three treatment settings the prevalence of symptoms with different contents were ranked and compared across genders.

Doubts and indecisiveness were the most common obsessions and washing the most common compulsion for the whole sample. Fears of impurity and contamination, obsessive thoughts about self-impurity and washing compulsions were more common in women, whereas blasphemous thoughts and orderliness compulsions were more common in men.

With minor differences, the pattern of symptoms with various contents in this sample was similar to that in Western settings.