Obsessive disorder may strike after childbirth

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Women face an increased risk of developing obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) soon after giving birth to a child, Turkish researchers report.

First-time mothers appear to be at particularly high risk, according to Dr. Faruk Uguz and colleagues from Selcuk University in Konya.

While postpartum depression has been studied extensively, Uguz and his team note, there is little research on OCD among new mothers. To investigate, they studied 302 women who gave birth in a 4-month period at one hospital in Turkey.

Twelve of the 302 women, or 4 percent, developed OCD symptoms within six weeks of delivering a baby, Uguz and colleagues found. Nine of the women were first-time mothers, meaning the OCD rate for women giving birth to their first child was 6.5 percent, compared to about 2 percent for women who already had at least one child.

OCD is estimated to strike between 0.05 percent and 0.39 percent of the general female population each year, suggesting that women are at several-fold greater risk of developing symptoms during the postpartum period, the researchers explain.

Three-quarters of the women experienced obsessive thoughts of contamination, while one-third experienced aggressive obsessive thoughts (for example about hurting the baby) and another third had obsessive thoughts about symmetry and exactness. The most common compulsions were cleaning and washing, seen in two-thirds of the women, followed by checking and re-checking in somewhat more than half, and ordering and arranging in one-third.

"All women ... should be carefully screened for OCD in the postpartum period," the researchers conclude.

SOURCE: Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, January 2007.