Background: Oculomotor studies have found saccadic abnormalities in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), lending support for models postulating a central role for inhibition in OCD. Saccadic abnormalities in OCD may also be potential candidates for a biological marker, important for more endophenotype-oriented research. Saccadic abnormalities have not been examined in psychotropic-naive patients with OCD without co-morbidity.
Method: We compared the error rates and latencies of 14 carefully selected adult psychotropic-naive patients with OCD with no co-morbid diagnosis and 14 pairwise matched healthy controls on a fixation task, on a prosaccade task and on an antisaccade task.
Results: Patients with OCD showed normal error rates on all tasks, but latencies on the antisaccade task were significantly increased.
Conclusions: Our results indicate that patients with OCD have no gross impairment of oculomotor inhibitory capacities, but may have a disturbed capacity to deliberately initiate a saccade to an imagined target.