Does Your Dog Have OCD?

Does your dog chase its tail or lick its paws over and over again? Maybe it has the dog-equivalent of OCD, a condition called CCD or canine compulsive disorder.

Now, researchers have discovered that MRI brain scans of 8 CCD-affected Doberman pinschers show similar brain characteristics with humans with OCD:

For the study, Ogata and colleagues recruited eight Doberman pinschers with CCD and a control group of eight Dobermans without CCD. The team chose Dobermans because they are the first breed to show a genetic basis for CCD and because the breed has a high prevalence of CCD—about 28 percent of U.S. Dobermans, said Ogata, whose study was published online in April in the journal Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology & Biological Psychiatry.

After obtaining MRI scans for each group, the team discovered that the CCD dogs had higher total brain and gray matter volumes and lower gray matter densities in certain parts of the brain—similar to the structures of people brains' with OCD. Gray matter is a brownish-gray tissue inside the brain and spinal cord that contains mostly nerve cells.

Christine Dell'Amore of National Geographic reports: Link