Qianqian Li^1,2 • Jun Yan^1,2 • Jinmin Liao^1,2 • Xiao Zhang^1,2 • Lijun Liu^1,2 • Xiaoyu Fu^1,2 • Hao Yang Tan^5,6 • Dai Zhang^1,2,3,4 • Hao Yan^1,2

¹ Peking University Sixth Hospital, Beijing 100191, China 

² Peking University Institute of Mental Health, National Health Commission Key Laboratory of Mental Health (Peking University), National Clinical Research Center for Mental Disorders (Peking University Sixth Hospital), Beijing 100191, China 

³ Tsinghua University-Peking University Joint Center for Life Sciences, Beijing 100871, China 

⁴ PKU-IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China 

⁵ Lieber Institute for Brain Development, Baltimore, MD 21205, USA 

⁶ Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD 21205, USA

Abstract

Stress might exaggerate the compulsion and impair the working memory of patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). This study evaluated the effect of stress on the cognitive neural processing of working memory in OCD and its clinical significance using a “number calculation working memory” task. Thirty-eight patients and 55 gender- and education-matched healthy controls were examined. Stress impaired the performance of the manipulation task in patients. Healthy controls showed less engagement of the medial prefrontal cortex and striatum during the task under stress versus less stress, which was absent in the patients with OCD. The diagnosis × stress interaction effect was significant in the right fusiform, supplementary motor area, precentral cortex and caudate. The failure of suppression of the medial prefrontal cortex and striatum and stress-related hyperactivation in the right fusiform, supplementary motor area, precentral cortex, and caudate might be an OCD-related psychopathological and neural response to stress.

Keywords

Working memory; Acute stress; Obsessivecompulsive disorder; Functional magnetic resonance imaging

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