According to the study’s findings, published in the May issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, children with OCD between the ages of 5 and 8 may benefit from a form of psychotherapy, known as family-based cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), that is uniquely tailored to the child’s developmental needs and family context. The overall focus of family-based CBT is to provide both child and parents with a set of tools to help them understand, manage and reduce OCD symptoms.

“If left untreated, early childhood OCD can severely disrupt and impair a child’s development and functioning and can extend into adulthood. Despite this risk, clinicians do not have a proven treatment model for these young children,” says lead author Jennifer B. Freeman, Ph.D., of the Bradley Hasbro Children’s Research Center and an assistant professor of psychiatry/human behavior (research) at The Warren Alpert Medical School of Brown University.

“Based on our findings, we believe that family-based cognitive behavioral therapy for early childhood OCD offers a promising intervention that may help to minimize the chronic nature of OCD and decrease the morbidity of this debilitating illness,” she adds.

Researchers worked with 42 young children with OCD who were randomized to receive 12 sessions – completed over 14 weeks – of either family-based CBT or family-based relaxation treatment (RT), an approach that teaches the family and child relaxation techniques aimed at reducing some of the stress inherent with OCD. Just over half of the patients were randomly assigned to CBT and 48 percent were assigned to RT. Overall, 74 percent of patients completed all 14 weeks of treatment.

The CBT program was found to be significantly more effective than RT in decreasing OCD symptoms and, most importantly, helping a large number of children achieve clinical remission. Specifically, 69 percent of the children who completed all 14 weeks of CBT treatment achieved remission compared to 20 percent who fully completed the RT program. Even those children who started, but did not complete, the CBT program did well, with 50 percent achieving clinical remission

“An important takeaway from this study is that children in this age range can actively participate in and benefit from CBT that is appropriately tailored to their cognitive developmental level,” Freeman says. “And from a research perspective, these findings are particularly promising because they demonstrate that it’s possible to recruit, treat and collect data about young children with OCD.”

The family-based CBT method modeled in the study draws on successful approaches used with older children but also contains innovative elements that have been specifically tailored to children ages 5 to 8, with special attention paid to the child’s cognitive and developmental level and awareness of a child’s involvement in and dependence on a family system.

Freeman points out that there are a number of reasons why younger children experiencing OCD require this kind of tailored approach. “Developmentally, younger children generally have less sophisticated emotion awareness and expression skills than older children. Also, younger children rely on parents for guidance and direction more so than older children and parents may be more likely to inadvertently reinforce or even actively accommodate a young child’s rituals,” she says.-Lifespan