[Minor neurological signs in obsessive-compulsive disorders]

Present and classic observations allow us to relate the obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) with different structural and functional anomalies, disorders and neurological findings which let us elaborate etiopathogenic and therapeutic hypothesis. From this and from our experience in the study about soft neurologic signs (SNS) in psychiatry, we explored 20 patients with OCD (DSM-III), compared with 28 phobic disorders and 20 healthy controls, following a SNS protocol and picking up demographic and clinical variables. We besides administered intellectual efficiency exams (WAIS) and neuropsychological tests (Benton/Bender), blind to the SNS exploration. The OCD group showed a higher global incidence of SNS, and especially more alterations in movement's coordination in upper extremities and balance with a trend to show more anomalies in dominance-laterality. This higher incidence of SNS didn't correlate with age, familiar or personal psychiatric history, indicators of neuropsychological impairment and pharmacotherapy. Men with OCD showed more SNS than women did, and as men have higher schooling rates, we found a relationship between SNS and schooling. OCD group showed a trend to be more intelligent than healthy controls, reaching significant higher scores in verbal than in manipulative scales. This lower manipulative score could relate with SNS, suggesting a possible concordance or significant relation with neurobiologic hypothesis, but not supporting neuroevolutionary and organic impairment theories as OCD etiopathogenesis.