Stressful Life Events and the Clinical Expression of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD): An Exploratory Study.

Background: In obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), symptom content and severity appear to fluctuate over the course of the life cycle in accordance with stressful life events. The objective of this paper was to compare OCD patients with and without reported stressful life events (SLEs) in terms of the sociodemographics of patients and the clinical characteristics of OCD.

Methods: This was a cross-sectional study involving 1001 patients with OCD.