Basal-corticofrontal circuits in schizophrenia and obsessive-compulsive disorder: a controlled, double dissociation study.

Background: Several lines of research suggest that prefrontal cortex dysfunctions observed in obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and schizophrenia (SKZ) are linked to two partially independent neuroanatomic systems: the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, with different neuroanatomic connections, including the striatum. The primary aim of this study was to test this hypothesis using a double dissociation study of neuropsychological tasks performance of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and ventromedial prefrontal cortex.

Methods: We administered the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, the Gambling Task, and the four-disk version of the Tower of Hanoi to 110 SKZ and 67 OCD patients and 56 control subjects.