Growth rate in adolescents with obsessive-compulsive disorder.

In an epidemiological study of 5,596 high school students, the authors identified 20 adolescents with obsessive-compulsive disorder and compared their physical size to that of adolescents of the same sex with no obsessive-compulsive symptoms. The obsessive-compulsive boys (N = 11) were shorter and weighed less than the other boys (N = 2,479) and were shorter than a subsample of normal boys (N = 33) and boys with other psychiatric diagnoses (N = 16). Regression analysis showed a flatter growth pattern through adolescence for the obsessive-compulsive boys (although within the 95% confidence limits for the other boys), suggesting a subtle neuroendocrine dysfunction in obsessive-compulsive disorder.