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Re: Neurobiology of SSRI's
John Martin · 7/7/99 at 10:52 pm ET
You may want to focus more on animal/infrahuman models of OCD. There has been some research in the last 10 years suggesting that certain serotonergic pathways in the amygdala region show a high resistance to response extinction particularly when the initial response was to a stimulus that threatened the survival of the organism (wish I could remember the reference; pretty heavy duty phys psych guy out of California; may have done some work with Steve Hilliard). I think you can see the possible implications for a model of OCD: certain things will be done without extinction in response to a (presumed) threat to survival.
However, keep in mind that just because you give an OCD patient an SSRI and s/he gets better doesn't mean that serotonin is the culprit. The effect of SSRI on the nervous system is analogous to doing heart surgery with a chainsaw: not very delicate or specific. BTW, at last estimate we have only identified at most 20% of neurotransmitters in the CNS. So at this stage of the game, as Paul says, there are no known molecular defects responsible for OCD.
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