Letter to the EditorSuccessful Application of Add-on Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation (tDCS) for Treatment of SSRI Resistant OCD
Section snippets
Subjects
Ms. K, a 39-year-old right-handed woman, was diagnosed with DSM-V OCD. She had a 5 year history of illness characterized by obsessions of aggressive (harming others with knife and tearing currency notes), and sexual and blasphemous content along with cognitive compulsions (silently reciting prayers). She completely avoided any potential stimulus that might provoke her obsessions. Prior treatment trials with escitalopram (30 mg/day for 3-months), and sertraline (300 mg/day for 4-months) did not
Discussion
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of successful application of add-on tDCS for SSRI-resistant OCD leading to significant clinical improvement. The significant increase in the left SMA activity after tDCS during response inhibition in the one patient concurs with a recent fMRI study in OCD [1]; this might have resulted in efficient response inhibition leading to clinical improvement. The patients also had reduction of anxiety and depressive symptoms. In contrast to
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JCN is supported by the INSPIRE faculty award by the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India (IFA12-LSBM-26). DJ is supported by the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India. BS is supported by Department of Biotechnology, Government of India (BT/06/IYBA/2012). HC is supported by the Department of Science & Technology, Government of India (SR/CSI/158/2012). SMA, AB& SVK are supported by the Wellcome Trust/DBT India Alliance (500236/Z/11/Z).
Financial disclosures: All the authors declare that there are no biomedical financial interests or potential conflicts of interest in connection with this article.