The Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet) has awarded our group leader a half-time position (“forskare på halvtid i klinisk miljö”) for a maximum of 6 years and the position comes with a yearly contribution of 880000 SEK.
On December 1st, the American Psychiatric Association issued a news release announcing the novelties in the upcoming version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, DSM-5, which will be published in May 2013. We at Rücklab are very pleased to see that Hoarding Disorder, one of our lab’s main interest areas, will be one of the very few new included disorders. APA have embraced a conservative approach to DSM-5 and the number of disorders will be roughly the same compared to the previous version of the manual. It is stated that the inclusion of Hoarding Disorder is supported by “extensive scientific research” and we at Rücklab want to thank those envolved in this reserach during the past years.
We are confident in that the addition of this new disorder will spur the research field even more and we hope that those who benefit mostly from this inclusion will be the sufferers, and their families!
Read more:
Evelyn Andersson has roamed the lab with her iPhone and her impression are now published in our new Gallery section. 
Paulina Wiktor, first year psychology student, is a new volonteer in our group and today helped us send info on our OCD trial to each and every general practioner in Stockholm. Thanks!
Jesper Enander today sucessfully passed the admission seminar to become a PhD student at Karolinska Institutet. His studies will be on Body Dysmorphic Disorder. Christian Rück is main supervisor and co-supervisors are Brjánn Ljótsson, Paul Lichtenstein and David Mataix-Cols.
We were visited today by Luca Montanelli, Lucia Mondini and Giacomo Grassi from Stefano Pallanti’s team at the University of Florence. The aim is to start a pilot of our internetbased CBT for OCD in Italy soon. 
A paper just out in Translational Psychiatry by Lester and collegues exemplifies the ideas of the novel field of therapygenetics – how individual genetic variation impacts psychological treatment response.
In this study, 374 anxiety-disordered children who had completed a standardized cognitive behaviour therapy, were genotyped for single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the nerve growth factor (NGF) (rs6330), brain-derived neurotrophic factory (BDNF) (rs6265) and in the serotonin transporter (5-HTTLPR) gene. These genes are considered important in synaptic plasticity and response to stress, and are expressed in areas in the brain responsible for fear and mood regulation.
Primary outcome measure was simply whether or not the participant fulfilled the anxiety diagnosis criteria post treatment. Treatment response was assessed immediately after treatment and at follow-ups. Lester and colleagues found that participants with one or more copies of the t-allele of NGF rs6330 were significantly more likely to be free of their diagnosis at follow-up. No interactional effect was observed between BDNF rs6265 or the 5-HTTLPR and treatment response. However, the 5-HTLLPR had a significant main effect as a predictor for treatment prognosis.
The authors reason that tyhe findings on NGF could be beneficial in helping to decide whether a child is likely to benefit from standard CBT or if further interventions should be considered.
For more on this topic, read:
- Beevers CG, McGeary JE. 2012. Therapygenetics: moving towards personalized psychotherapy treatment. Trends Cogn Sci 16:11-12.
- Bockting CL, RJ Mocking, A Lok, MW Koeter, AH Schene. 2012. Therapygenetics: the 5HTTLPR as a biomarker for response to psychological therapy? Mol Psychiatry.
- Eley, TC, JL Hudson, C Creswell, et al. 2012. Therapygenetics: the 5HTTLPR and response to psychological therapy. Mol Psychiatry 17:236-237.
This week, members from Rücklab visited the congress on neuropsychiatry “NPF barn och ungdomar, kunskap, insikt och samverkan”. Volen Ivanov and Fabian Lenhard each held a talk on Hoarding Disorder and CBT for children with high-functioning autism. We would like to thank the organizers Göteborgs stad (among others) for giving us the opportunity to speak at the beautiful old cinema theatre “Draken” in front of more than 300 attendants!
If you ever wondered where all the DNA in our studies end up, this is for you. As you may know, Rucklab has several genetical studies and one of the goals is to identify genes that are relevant to treatment response in CBT. We are now at more than 1000 patients that have left us their DNA and the collections is ongoing, some results are already published. Anyway, it’s all safely stored in a large freezer room underground. And thanks to our patients, nurse Monica Hellberg and lab technician Alexandra Tylec we hope to fill up another freezer soon. …
Dogs sometimes suffer from behaviors such as tail chasing, flank or blanket sucking and other repetetive behaviors that can be harmful and that are diagnosed as Canine Compulsive Disorder and considered an analog to OCD in humans. The extraordinary phenotypic diversity of dog breeds has been sculpted by a unique population history accompanied by selection for novel and desirable traits. These wanted traits may also lead to an accumulation of a disorder within one breed and may be of special interest when studying the genetics of certain traits.
Dodman and collegues studied 92 doberman pinchers (pet dogs) that had flank or blanket sucking and controls with a genome wide association study (GWAS) and found a new canidate gene; CDH2. CDH2 is widely expressed,
mediating synaptic activity-regulated neuronal adhesion. Dogs showing multiple compulsive behaviors had a higher frequency of the risk allele than dogs with a less severe phenotype. Kerstin Lindblad-Toh and others at Broad Institute and Uppsala University are continuing to investigate this and other candidate genes. A recent Finnish study by Tiira et al of tail chasers but in 3 other dog breeds than Dobermans failed to find an association with CDH2.
For those interested in a more detailed review of animal models in OCD we recommend a review by Albeleda and Joel in Neuroscience 2012 (see below for full reference).
Rücklab - Psychiatry research at Karolinska Institutet 