Eye movement tracking in pediatric obsessive compulsive disorder.

Till date researchers have elucidated the neurobiological substrates in OCD using methods like neuroimaging. However, a potential biomarker is still elusive. The present study is an attempt to identify a potential biomarker in pediatric OCD using eye tracking. The present study measured pro-saccade and anti-saccade parameters in 36 cases of pediatric OCD and 31 healthy controls. There was no significant difference between cases and controls in the error rate, peak velocity, position gain and latency measures in both pro-saccade and anti-saccade eye tracking tasks. With age, anti-saccades become slower in velocity, faster in response and more accurate irrespective of disorder status of the child. Pro-saccades also show a similar effect that is less prominent than anti-saccades. Gain measures more significantly vary with age in children with OCD than the controls, whereas latency measures positively correlated with age in children with OCD as opposed to being negatively correlated in the controls. Findings of this study do not support any of the eye tracking measures as putative diagnostic bio-markers in OCD. However, latency and gain parameters across different age groups in anti-saccade tasks need to be explored in future studies.