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| Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder |
A little less than one half of OCD patients in one Egyptian study presented with a mixture of obsessions and compulsions, whereas 29% presented with obsessions and 31% with compulsions.
The most commonly occurring obsessions were religious and contamination obsessions (60%) and somatic obsessions (49%), and the most commonly occurring compulsions were repeating rituals (68%), cleaning and washing compulsions (63%) and checking compulsions (58%). One-third of patients had a comorbid depressive disorder, while premorbidly 14% had obsessive personality disorder, 34% had paranoid, anxious, or emotionally labile personality disorder, and 52% had no premorbid personality disorder. A comparison was drawn between the most prevalent symptoms in the Egyptian sample and those of other studies in India, England and Jerusalem. Contamination obsessions were the most frequent in all studies. The similarities in obsessive content betweenMoslems and Christians signified the role played by cultural and religious rituals in the presentation of OCD. Also, the obsessional contents of the samples from Egypt and Jerusalem were similar, dealing mainly with religious matters and matters related to cleanliness and dirt. Common themes between the Indian and British samples, on the other hand, were mostly related to orderliness and aggression.
