SRIs Work for Compulsive Hoarders

Ivanhoe Newswire
Monday, November 6, 2006; 12:00 AM

By Vivian Richardson, Ivanhoe Health Correspondent

ORLANDO, Fla. (Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Piles of newspapers, fast food wrappers, plastic bags ... All things a compulsive hoarder may hang on to for years because the thought of throwing them away is unbearable.

Now, doctors report the condition may be more treatable than many believe. Despite previously held beliefs in the psychiatric health community, compulsive hoarding can be treated with medications used to treat obsessive-compulsive disorders (OCD). Before this study, the only treatment known to effective was behavioral therapy.

Compulsive hoarding is estimated to affect up to 2 million people in the United States. While the condition may be associated with other problems, like Alzheimer's, researcher Sanjaya Saxena, M.D., director of the OCD program at the University of California, San Diego, says it's most commonly found in patients with OCD.

Dr. Saxena and colleagues tested the effectiveness of paroxetine (Paxil) -- a serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SRI) -- for the treatment of OCD patients with compulsive hoarding syndrome. They discovered both the hoarding and non-hoarding patients with OCD had similar responses to the medication. The finding contradicts past studies which suggested the syndrome was difficult to treat.

Dr. Saxena told Ivanhoe the results are encouraging for people with the syndrome and their families. "It means it is even more treatable than we had originally imagined," he said. Combined with behavioral therapy, SRIs have the potential to help many people with compulsive hoarding syndrome.

SOCIAL AND HEALTH HAZARD

At its mildest, compulsive hoarding can mean taking too long to complete tasks because things get lost in disorganized piles. At its most severe, most or all rooms of a person's home will be unusable because of clutter. Nothing is thrown away, "even though everybody else around the person can see this stuff is minimally valuable or not valuable at all," Dr. Saxena said.

"We know lots of people with compulsive hoarding who haven't had people over to their home in years because they are too embarrassed and filled with shame that it is too cluttered," Dr. Saxena said. He described a patient who had not had anyone other than close blood-relatives into his or her home for more than 20 years.