Psychiatry Research EG

Background The coexistence of obsessive–compulsive symptoms (OCS) and obsessive– compulsive disorder (OCD) and substance use disorders (SUD) is an understudied area. Psychoactive drug use is increasingly prevailing among young people, which has a serious impact on our society but there are concerns that psychoactive drugs may be associated with psychiatric symptoms or psychobiological problems. There are converging lines of evidence demonstrating that SUD coexist with OCD or OCS with high prevalence. The mutual impact of substance abuse and OCD on the severity of each other and the lines of management postulated for such comorbidity have received much recent attention in the literature and yet it is understudied in our country. Objective Identifying the incidence of OCS, as well as OCD in patients with SUD, and their impact on severity of SUD. Patients and methods A group of 50 patients with a diagnosis of SUD males only, aged 18 to 65, medicated or nonmedicated and with no medical problems were compared with 30 matched healthy controls. They were subjected to SCID-I to confirm SUD diagnosis and assess OCS and OCD, addiction severity index and Yale–Brown Obsessive–Compulsive Scale. Results The OCD module of the SCID-I revealed that only one patient in this sample (2%) met criteria for OCD, compared with none in the control group. However 40% (N = 20) of the patients, who did not meet diagnostic criteria for OCD, suffered from OCS, which was comparable with the control group where prevalence of OCS was also 40%. Conclusion It was found that the comorbidity incidence of OCD or the association of OCS in our sample of substance abuse patients was not significant. Keywords: obsessive compulsive symptoms, obsessive compulsive disorder, substance use disorder