Citation

Chasson GS, Bello MS, Luxon AM, Graham TAA, Leventhal AM. Depress. Anxiety 2017; 34(8): 761-769.

Affiliation

Department of Preventive Medicine, Keck School of Medicine, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2017, John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1002/da.22669

PMID

28661022

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Transdiagnostic emotional vulnerabilities are suspected to underlie psychopathologic comorbidity but have received little attention in adolescent emotional pathology literature. We examined distress tolerance, anxiety sensitivity, and anhedonia as concomitant transdiagnostic mechanisms that account for (i.e., statistically mediate) the covariance between adolescent obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and major depressive disorder (MDD) symptoms.

METHOD: Data on MDD, OCD, and the three aforementioned transdiagnostic vulnerabilities were collected from a community-based sample of 3,094 ninth graders in a large metropolitan area and analyzed using mixed effects modeling to evaluate mediation effects.

RESULTS: Individually and when controlling for each other, all three transdiagnostic vulnerabilities mediated the relation between OCD and MDD symptoms both before and after adjusting for demographics.

CONCLUSIONS: Distress tolerance, anxiety sensitivity, and anhedonia may be unique mechanisms accounting for comorbidity between OCD and MDD symptoms in youth. Longitudinal evaluation of these candidate transdiagnostic emotional vulnerabilities in adolescent OCD-MDD comorbidity is warranted.

© 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Language: en

Keywords

anhedonia; anxiety; comorbidity; depression; obsessive-compulsive disorder