Academic skills in pediatric obsessive-compulsive disorder: A preliminary study

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
• Educational Psychology

Background:

• Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) is a common and impairing childhood-onset disorder.
• OCD significantly affects youth functioning and family dynamics.
• School performance is crucial for child development, necessitating study of OCD's academic impact.

Purpose of the Study:

• To compare academic skills in youth with OCD versus healthy controls.
• To identify specific academic deficits associated with OCD in children and adolescents.

Main Methods:

• Compared academic skills of 25 youth (ages 7-18) with OCD to 25 matched healthy controls (HCs).
• Utilized standardized testing for academic skill assessment.
• Employed analysis of variance (ANOVA) to analyze group differences.

Main Results:

• Youth with OCD exhibited significantly poorer math calculation performance than HCs (P = .029).
• A higher percentage of the OCD group (36%) fell below average in math compared to HCs (12%) (P = .047).
• No significant differences were found in word reading or spelling; academic skills did not correlate with symptom severity.

Conclusions:

• A notable proportion of youth with OCD may experience underperformance in mathematics.
• Further research is needed to confirm these findings and explore academic support strategies for this population.