Cerebral white matter volume changes in patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder: Voxel-based morphometry.

AIMS: We carried out a voxel-based morphometry (VBM) study to evaluate cerebral white matter (WM) volume alteration in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and its correlation with the scores of the Yale-Brown Obsessive-Compulsive Scale (Y-BOCS).

METHODS: Fourteen patients with OCD, who were diagnosed using the DSM-IV-TR, and 14 age-matched healthy controls participated. The high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging data were analyzed by voxel-based morphometry and Statistical Parametric Mapping 8.

RESULTS: There was no significant difference in the total intracranial volumes between OCD patients and healthy controls. However, patients with OCD showed significantly increased WM volumes in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, middle frontal gyrus, precuneus, and inferior parietal lobule compared with healthy controls. In addition, the OCD patients showed a positive correlation between the WM volumes of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and Y-BOCS scores (r = 0.334, P = 0.03 and Pearson's correlation coefficient = 0.58) rating for the severity of OCD symptoms.

CONCLUSIONS: WM volume variations of the specific brain regions in patients with OCD will be helpful to understand the neural connectivity associated with a symptom of OCD. Furthermore, the findings would be valuable to aid the diagnostic accuracy of OCD in connection with morphometric magnetic resonance imaging analysis.