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Record W2005880896 · doi:10.4088/pcc.13l01623

Lithium Treatment of Chronic Nail Biting

2014· article· en· W2005880896 on OpenAlex
Verinder Sharma, Christina Sommerdyk

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueThe Primary Care Companion For CNS Disorders · 2014
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldPsychology
TopicObsessive-Compulsive Spectrum Disorders
Canadian institutionsLondon Health Sciences CentreWestern University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsBitingMedicineNail (fastener)Lithium (medication)DermatologyDentistryInternal medicineMaterials scienceBiologyMetallurgyEcology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

To the Editor: Nail biting or onychophagia has been variously described as a habit to release tension, self-mutilation behavior, or an impulse control disorder. In the DSM-5, nail biting is classified as an obsessive-compulsive and related disorder.1 Studies have found that between 28% and 33% of children between ages 7 and 10 years, 44% of adolescents, and 19%–29% of young adults engage in nail biting.2 Nail biting usually occurs in combination with other problematic body-focused repetitive behaviors such as hair pulling disorder and skin picking disorder. Nail biting in adults is underrecognized because patients often fail to seek help due to feelings of shame and embarrassment, and, consequently, the disorder has received little attention in the psychiatric literature. In most cases, nail biting seems to be only a cosmetic issue, and no treatment is required. But, in severe cases, untreated nail biting can result in a host of complications such as severe damage to the cuticles and nails, paronychia and secondary bacterial infection, dental problems, and temporomandibular dysfunction.3 Studies on drug treatment of nail biting are sparse and limited to antidepressants and N-acetylcysteine.4 We present a case of chronic, severe onychophagia comorbid with bipolar II disorder and substance use disorder and discuss the successful treatment of these disorders with lithium monotherapy. Case report. Ms A, a 28-year-old woman, was referred by her family physician for assessment and management of depression. She met DSM-5 criteria for bipolar II disorder and was noted to be in remission for substance use disorder (alcohol dependence and cocaine use). At the time of initial assessment, Ms A endorsed various symptoms of depression including thoughts of suicide. Due to concerns regarding her safety, lithium 900 mg daily was started, and the dose was optimized to achieve a serum level of 0.7 mmol/L. Within 2 months of lithium treatment, Ms A experienced remission of depression and has been symptom free for 2 years. A serendipitous finding was remission of symptoms of chronic nail biting that Ms A had struggled with since she was 12 years old. Various strategies including habit reversal training, self-monitoring, and competing response had been ineffective.5 The condition was severe because Ms A had to regularly cover the nail beds with Band-Aids to control the bleeding. Moreover, it affected her self-esteem and caused a great deal of emotional distress. The marked improvement following lithium treatment was noted by Ms A’s family and friends, who had not seen her undamaged nails in at least 15 years. Clomipramine and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors are generally recommended in severe cases of nail biting, but the use of these drugs can cause treatment-emergent mania in individuals with bipolar disorder. Thus, the drug choice for onychophagia should be informed by the nature of the comorbid psychiatric disorder. There are reports of effectiveness of lithium in body-focused repetitive behaviors such as hair pulling disorder and skin picking disorder with comorbid bipolar disorder. It is not known if lithium is effective in patients with onychophagia in the absence of bipolar disorder. To our knowledge, this is the first reported case of lithium effectiveness in nail biting. Studies are needed to clarify the role of lithium in the management of severe nail biting in the absence of comorbid bipolar disorder.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Other design · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.834
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.013
GPT teacher head0.277
Teacher spread0.264 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it