THE GUT MICROBIOME IN OBSESSIVE-COMPULSIVE DISORDER
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is a debilitating, chronic neuropsychiatric disorder estimated to effect approximately 1-2% of the Canadian population. Our understanding of the pathophysiological mechanisms involved in OCD is unclear, as evidenced by the moderate response associated with treatments targeting these putative pathways. As such, there is a need to explore novel mechanisms of disease. Recent research has focused on the gut-brain axis and highlighted the potential role of the gut microbiota in psychiatric conditions. Further, the role of inflammation is also gaining traction in psychiatric research. This thesis investigates the role of these commensal gut bacteria in OCD, by examining stool samples of unmedicated, non-depressed OCD outpatients and healthy community controls. Given that systemic inflammation is a suggested pathway by which gut bacteria effect behaviour, morning levels of C-reactive protein (CRP), interleukin-6 (IL-6) and tumor-necrosis factors-α (TNF-α) were also examined. To our knowledge, this thesis is the first investigation of the gut microbiome in OCD. This thesis describes: (1) a critical review of the literature developing a theoretical basis for a role of microbial dysbiosis in OCD; that (2) three specific genera and species richness/diversity are lower in OCD patients compared to controls; (3) mean CRP, but not IL-6 and TNF-α, is elevated in this sample of OCD patients; and (4) gastrointestinal symptom severity and prevalence of irritable bowel syndrome is higher in OCD. Taken together, this thesis is the first study to provide evidence for microbial dysbiosis in OCD. Although systemic inflammation may not mediate the relationship between reduced diversity and OCD symptomatology, these results provide evidence for mild systemic inflammation. Further gastrointestinal and psychiatric symptom severity are positively correlated, but not specific to patients with IBS. These results suggest the gut microbiome may be a potential pathway of interest for future OCD research, clinical implications are also made.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot 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.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.131 | 0.003 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".