Situation Awareness in Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and Their Relatives: an Endophenotype Study

It has been theorized that endophenotype models will help to understand the etiology of heterogeneous brain disorders such as obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). In this study, it was aimed to determine whether "situational awareness" impairments which can be defined as partially naturalistic working memory deficits, are an endofenotype for OCD.

In this study, situational awareness (SA) task performances of 67 OCD patients, 50 their unaffected first-degree relatives, and 41 healthy controls who matched with regard to sex, age and years of education were measured to investigate endophenotypes in OCD. For this purpose, a visuospatial working memory test was used.

As a result, the relatives showed a task performance between patients with OCD and control group in both SA1 and SA2 tasks. Patients with OCD performed significantly worse than control group on SA1 single and dual task. On the other hand, there were no significant differences between relatives and patients of any SA assessment.

These results indicated that poor situational awareness may be a candidate endophenotype for OCD. Early perceptual dysfunctions such as poor performance on SA1 task can mediate the genetic risk for OCD.