A recent Brown University study published in Imaging Neuroscience found that while individuals with OCD perform sequential cognitive tasks as well as healthy controls, their brains recruit additional, previously unrelated regions to do so. By using MRI scans during a dynamic sequencing task that mimics real-world cognitive demands, researchers identified new brain networks involved in motor control, working memory, and object recognition.
Co-author Nicole McLaughlin, PhD, notes that targeting these newly implicated regions could significantly improve the efficacy of transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) treatments, which currently help only 30% to 40% of patients. Consequently, the team plans to use this sequencing task as a clinical assessment tool to track brain activity changes during treatment and predict effective symptom reduction.
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