SAN DIEGO, Oct. 27 -- Although anorexia nervosa patients commonly have obsessions and compulsions, that doesn't necessarily translate into full-blown obsessive-compulsive disorder, according to a Polish team.
In a study of 120 adolescent patients with anorexia, 51.8% had obsessions related to food and body-image and 36.8% had other compulsions, but none met the criteria for obsessive-compulsive disorder, said Tomasz Wolanczyk, M.D., Ph.D., of the Medical University of Warsaw.
"Clinicians should be very careful diagnosing OCD," he said in a poster presentation at the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry meeting here. "If the diagnosis is comorbid OCD, it may lead to pharmacotherapy."
Previous studies have reported that 6% to 33% of patients with anorexia have comorbid OCD. However, most of these studies have based the diagnosis of OCD on clinical impression instead of diagnostic tests as well, Dr. Wolanczyk said.
