Effects of Bergen 4-Day Treatment on Resting-State Graph Features in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

Abstract

It takes a village to raise a child and even more to raise a scientist, and this thesis would not be possible without years of work by my supervisors. I wish to thank Gerd Kvale and Bjarne Hansen for bothering to answer an email from me, a naïve psychology student, in November 2013. I had just received an offer to revise and resubmit my first article by a slightly confused editor who probably didn't understand what to do with a review paper written by a student with no supervisor. Gerd and Bjarne decided to give me a chance to work as a research assistant, which became the first building block of my PhD and our first paper together (Thorsen, van den Heuvel, Hansen, & Kvale, 2015). I wish to thank Bjarne and Gerd for showing how to combine being a caring person, clinician, and scientist. In addition, I thank them for trusting eager new students with important work and for guiding both patients and students to help them prosper. I wish to thank Odile van den Heuvel for her kind, intensive, generous, and enlightening guidance on how to combine living a good life and doing science. I remember travelling to Amsterdam for the first time in June 2014, then an eager and anxious 23-year old. However, my anxiety was soon lifted by Odile, the members of her research group, and her lovely family. I especially wish to thank her for her utmost generosity in inviting to me to live with her and her family for many of my visits to Amsterdam. Words cannot express my gratitude to my supervisors, and I look forward to working and spending time together in the future. I wish to thank my family and friends which make both life and work meaningful. I especially wish to thank Stella J. de Wit for guidance, discussions, and lots of fun throughout my PhD. I also thank her for inviting me to get to know her dear family. My visits to Weesp are very dear to me,

Increased functional connectivity between presupplementary motor area and inferior frontal gyrus associated with the ability of motor response inhibition in obsessive–compulsive disorder

“…These circuits might be related to the compulsive symptoms and some cognitive dysfunctions of OCD (de Vries et al, 2017;Harrison et al, 2013;Pauls, Abramovitch, Rauch, & Geller, 2014;Thorsen et al, 2018;Thorsen et al, 2020;van den Heuvel et al, 2016). Especially, parallel and partly segregated CSTC circuits mediate some behavioral control functions involving motor, cognitive, affective, and motivational process (Stein et al, 2019;van den Heuvel et al, 2016;van Velzen, Vriend, de Wit, & van den Heuvel, 2014).…”

Neural Correlates of Executive Functioning in Anorexia Nervosa and Obsessive–Compulsive Disorder

“…Response inhibition may represent a neurocognitive endophenotype of the disorder as similar impairments are present across unaffected first-degree relatives and individuals with OCD when compared to HCs (e.g., Menzies et al, 2007 ; Lennertz et al, 2012 ; Bora, 2020 ). Further support is provided by studies examining task-related neural activity pre-/post-treatment, with stable inhibition-related neural activity before and after exposure treatment reported in individuals with OCD ( Thorsen et al, 2021 ). However, this literature is limited and inconsistent, as response inhibition performance has also been reported to improve in individuals with OCD following behavioral therapy (e.g., Nabeyama et al, 2008 ).…”

IT IS NOT A SMALL WORLD FOR PSYCHIATRIC PATIENTS: Small-world of psychiatric patients

“…Many studies investigated the accuracy of such metrics as biomarkers extracted from neuroimaging data and discovered conflicting results for SCZ patients (see (Gao et al, 2023) for a recent meta-analysis). As a less studied disease using graph theoretical approaches, OCD patients showed more consistent results with GE than healthy controls (Akin, 2021; Li, Li, Cao, et al, 2022; Li, Li, Jiang, et al, 2022; Thorsen et al, 2021).…”