Casey was diagnosed with canine compulsive disorder. He’s now on Prozac. (Courtesy)
When Casey, a 6-year-old German Shepherd, gets anxious, she chases her tail.
But it’s not the kind of endearing, once-around-and-it’s-done kind of tail-chasing we’ve all seen. Left unchecked, Casey circles around and around, pursuing her tail until she can bite it. Then, even when the blood starts flowing, the dog is driven to continue the chase.
“It’s upsetting,” says Paula Bagge, a Hopkinton, Mass. business owner who has been living with Casey since puppyhood. “And it’s damaging. She hurls herself around the house, and it’s like a big bloody paintbrush spraying the walls.” Once, Bagge tied the dog’s leash to a coffee table in an attempt to control the chasing. But Casey, who weighs about 85 pounds, just started dragging the coffee table around with her. Now, she’s on Prozac.
Dogs, it turns out, can have obsessive-compulsive disorder, just like people. And in a new study, Dr. Nicholas Dodman, a professor of clinical sciences at the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts University, found that structural brain abnormalities in dogs, in this case Doberman pinschers, with canine compulsive disorder (CCD) are similar to those of humans with OCD.
In an earlier study, Dodman, a leading researcher on repetitive behavior in animals, found a specific gene associated with canine OCD.
Studying anxiety disorders in dogs, Dodman says, may ultimately help scientists come up with better therapies and medications to treat OCD and related conditions in people. Current drugs for OCD, such as SSRI’s (or for dogs, a beef-flavored form of Prozac) are notoriously ineffective for many sufferers. Indeed, Dodman says, only around 43 to 60 percent of people suffering from OCD show a postive response from an SSRI; the average reduction of symptoms in people taking these drugs is only about 23 to 43 percent. “Certainly not a panacea,” he says.
So, to further this research, Dodman spends time thinking about bears who pace obsessively, for instance, or parrots unable to stop preening and picking their feathers and beagles who overeat to the point of exploding,
Dodman calls the latest dog-brain imaging study, conducted in collaboration with researchers at McLean Hospital, in Belmont, Mass., “another piece of the puzzle, another brick in the wall.”
He says while more research must be done, it’s becoming increasingly evident that dogs with OCD are a great model for exploring human psychopathology: they show similar behaviors, respond to drugs in comparable ways and now, at least in this small study, seem to have the same brain abnormalities as people with the condition. “When you know what your dealing with it’s much easier to create targeted approaches,” to treatment, Dodman says. “If you don’t know what you’re dealing with it’s just kind of like going with your sense of smell.”
OCD afflicts about 2 percent of the population and often goes untreated or undiagnosed. People suffering from the disorder, marked by intrusive thoughts and repetitive behaviors such as hand washing, locking and unlocking doors, counting, or repeating the same steps, feel these impulses as uncontrollable. And the compulsive rituals, often triggered by stress or trauma, can be incredibly time-consuming, interfering with daily life.
Famously, Lena Dunham, the star and creator of the HBO series “Girls” came out with her own OCD on air, with repetitive tics, obsessive counting and painfully compulsive use of Q-tips. Continue reading
