Impact of Comorbidity on Treatment Response to Paroxetine in Pediatric Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: Is the Use of Exclusion Criteria Empirically Supported in Randomized Clinical Trials?

Abstract

The results of these post hoc analyses show that comorbid illness adversely impacted response to pharmacotherapy with paroxetine in pediatric OCD and significantly increased risk of relapse following withdrawal from treatment. Continued paroxetine treatment reduced the relapse rates in all groups compared with placebo, including those with comorbid illness. Because pediatric OCD is frequently comorbid with other psychiatric disorders, results of randomized, controlled pediatric OCD trials that use multiple exclusion criteria may not generalize to more naturalistic OCD samples.