Beyond the Catchphrase: The pain and intransigence of obsessive-compulsive disorder motivates researchers plumbing its depths.
"With recent technological advances, Marsh and her colleagues are doing what their counterparts in other branches of medicine have been doing for more than a century: putting OCD under the microscope in the search for its biomarkers, the concrete signs of mental disorders that could revolutionize how they get diagnosed, treated and perhaps even prevented."
Rachel Marsh, PhD, reassures the readers that "the Research Domain Criteria Project (RDoC) has been launched by NIMH with the intention of understanding mental illness and dysfunction based on dimensions of observable behavior and neurobiological measures. RDoC is meant to eventually help rewrite the DSM, not abolish it. "
Rachel Marsh, PhD, "has demonstrated in two studies of adults and adolescents with bulimia nervosa (BN) that dysfunction in regions of the brain dedicated to self-regulation, and supported by networks called frontostriatal circuits, may be implicated in the inability to thwart the urge to binge eat and purge."
"Rachel Marsh, PhD, and colleagues at Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute compared the results of the Simon Spatial Incompatibility task in 40 women (20 with and 20 without BN) who were undergoing functional MRI. . . . The authors concluded that self-regulation in women with BN is impaired because they cannot appropriately engage frontostriatal circuits."
"Women with bulimia nervosa appear to respond more impulsively during psychological testing than those without eating disorders, and brain scans show differences in areas responsible for regulating behavior . . ."
"'These findings argue for looking more directly into dopamine systems in eating disorders,' said study author Rachel Marsh, an assistant professor of clinical psychology in the division of child and adolescent psychiatry at Columbia University in New York City."