Sexual Obsessions in Children and Adolescents: Prevalence and Outcome in the NordLOTS Sample
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objectives Sexual obsessions including thoughts about sexual acts with family members, sexually inappropriate behavior, or homosexual orientation may remain undiagnosed because of embarrassment to report thoughts that are perceived as unacceptable. This study investigated prevalence of sexual obsessions and treatment outcome. Methods Sexual obsessions and OCD severity were assessed with the Children’s Yale-Brown Obsessive- Compulsive Scale in all 269 participants of the Nordic Long-term OCD Treatment study (mean age 12.8 years, 48.7% boys) at baseline, after treatment and three years follow-up. Treatment consisted in individual manualized Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) with exposure and response prevention. Patients with and without sexual obsessions were compared on clinical characteristics and treatment outcomes. Results Sexual obsessions were reported by 18% of the NordLOTS sample. Participants with sexual obsessions were slightly older than those without (13.5 versus 12.7 years). Both groups had no difference in treatment outcome. Conclusion Our results suggest that a considerable number of children with OCD experience sexual obsessions. If addressed and treated, the response to CBT is similar as in other obsessions. Sexual obsessions may add a significant load of distress and embarrassment to the burden of exaggerated worries present in OCD. CBT practitioners need to be aware that sexual obsessions might be disguised and not disclosed during assessment and the treatment course. Clinicians need to assist the child to identify these obsessions in a sensitive dialogue and to address them in treatment. Findings, including case examples, will be discussed and implications for clinical practice outlined.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
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.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".