The Brazilian Research Consortium on Obsessive-Compulsive Spectrum Disorders: recruitment, assessment instruments, methods for the development of multicenter collaborative studies and preliminary results.

Objective: To describe the recruitment of patients, assessment instruments, implementation, methods and preliminary results of The Brazilian Research Consortium on Obsessive-Compulsive Spectrum Disorders, which includes seven university sites.

Method: This cross-sectional study included a comprehensive clinical assessment including semi-structured interviews (sociodemographic data, medical and psychiatric history, disease course and comorbid psychiatric diagnoses), and instruments to assess obsessive-compulsive (Yale-Brown Obsessive-Compulsive Scale and Dimensional Yale-Brown Obsessive-Compulsive Scale), depressive (Beck Depression Inventory) and anxious (Beck Anxiety Inventory) symptoms, sensory phenomena (Universidade de São Paulo Sensory Phenomena Scale), insight (Brown Assessment Beliefs Scale), tics (Yale Global Tics Severity Scale) and quality of life (Medical Outcome Quality of Life Scale Short-form-36 and Social Assessment Scale). The raters' training consisted of watching at least five videotaped interviews and interviewing five patients with an expert researcher before interviewing patients alone.

Obsessive-compulsive disorder: an open-label pilot trial of escitalopram.

Introduction: Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors are considered the most effective and well-established pharmacotherapy for the treatment of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), a chronic and disabling condition. However, approximately 40% of patients do not have a significant improvement, suggesting that new medications are needed. This study was designed to investigate the treatment response to escitalopram in OCD patients.