Investigating the Impact of Psychological and Medicinal Treatments on Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: A Meta-analysis

This study deals with the effect of cognitive-behavioral therapy, response prevention and exposure and medicinal treatments on OCD using a meta-analysis and by means of drawing a comparison between such techniques and OCD treatment. The structured review method was adopted for the purpose of selecting the required surveys; therefore, 28 surveys, including master's degree and doctoral theses and local and foreign papers and articles drawing upon the foregoing methods in OCD treatment, were selected as the research sample. The important factor in determining suitability of the studies and surveys was the statistical methods employed for their data analyses. In order to compute effect sizes, the standard difference between means was used. According to the ensuing results, CBT has an effect size of 1.611. Moreover, effect sizes of response prevention and exposure techniques and medicinal treatments were put at 1.59 and 0.617 respectively, suggesting effectiveness of the foregoing treatments. A comparison of efficiency of such therapies and treatments demonstrated, on the other hand, that CBT has the highest level of effect in OCD treatment. Furthermore, medicinal care is less effective than psychological therapies and treatments.