Neuropsychology of obsessive-compulsive disorder compared to bipolar affective disorder and a healthy control group

This study examined cognitive functions of patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) compared to patients with bipolar disorder (BD) and a healthy control (HC) group. The aim of this study was to show if there were distinguishable cognitive profiles and characteristics. 15 OCD patients without current depression, 18 euthymic patients with BD and 23 HC participants were tested. All participants passed through a neuropsychological test battery including attention, speeded information processing, learning and memory, executive functions and interference performance. Overall bipolar patients were more impaired than OCD patients. Both groups of patients revealed deficits in general information processing speed as well as in verbal learning and memory. By contrast, only BD patients showed significantly increased reaction times in the intermodal comparison and divided attention tests. In summary, this study provides evidence for both commonalities and disease-specific differences of cognitive deficit patterns in OCD and BD.