Reduced Prefrontal Activation in Pediatric Patients With Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder During Verbal Episodic Memory Encoding

摘要

Objective: Patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) often present with deficits in episodic memory, and there is evidence that these difficulties may be secondary to executive dysfunction, that is, impaired selection and/or application of memory-encoding strategies (mediation hypothesis). Semantic clustering is an effective strategy to enhance encoding of verbal episodic memory (VEM) when word lists are semantically related. Self-initiated mobilization of this strategy has been associated with increased activity in the prefrontal cortex, particularly the orbitofrontal cortex, a key region in the pathophysiology of OCD. We therefore studied children and adolescents with OCD during uncued semantic, clustering strategy application in a VEM functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)-encoding paradigm.