An international team, led by researchers at the King's Maudsley Partnership for Children & Young People, has received £2.2million in Wellcome Discovery funding to use AI to predict children at risk of OCD.
Obsessive-compulsive symptoms can be present in one in five children. Obsessions can be intrusive, unwelcome thoughts and compulsions may appear as repetitive, lengthy rituals. Whilst most children and young people grow out of these symptoms, a small percentage continue to experience obsessions and compulsions that then can impair a person's life, which can lead to a formal diagnosis of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD). By this stage, OCD can be more challenging to treat, with more chronic symptoms predicting poorer outcomes.
Talking to young people living with OCD and their parents, it's clear that intervening early, before symptoms spiral out of control, could prevent a lot of distress and anguish. This project aims to do just that for children not just in the UK, but in Brazil, Sweden and beyond.
Professor Philip Shaw, Director - King's Maudsley Partnership for Children & Young People
Currently, identifying the children most at risk of developing full OCD is difficult, and this inability to predict the onset of OCD is halting advances in treatment and understanding. Prediction is a vital step to help implement early interventions, and tailor interventions to the needs of each young person. The aim of this Wellcome Discovery funded project is to develop a tool to pinpoint who is likely to develop OCD and when this may be. To do this, easily obtainable medical information, often found in medical records, will be combined with more complex information on genetic make-up and brain features; to find out which type of information helps most in prediction.
OCD is often thought of as an adult condition, but symptoms frequently emerge in childhood, and that is precisely where the greatest opportunity lies. This project builds a prediction tool that combines routinely collected medical information, the kind already sitting in clinical records, with genetic and brain imaging data to identify which children are most likely to go on to develop full OCD. AI gives us the ability to integrate those complex, multi-layered signals in a way that simply wasn't feasible before, and to do so across diverse populations in the UK, Brazil, and Sweden.
Professor Gustavo Sudre, Professor of Genomic Neuroimaging and Artificial Intelligence, IoPPN
Once this prediction tool has been developed, the team will create a framework that incorporates a diverse range of views, including those of people with lived experience of OCD. The framework and tool will be piloted with parents of children deemed at risk of OCD, with a view of creating a scalable early intervention tool for OCD. This will involve culturally adapting, enriching and evaluating a digital early intervention too, including conducting open trials in the UK and Brazil to evaluate the intervention with parents of children identified as being at-risk, through the prediction tool developed earlier in the project.
Professor Philip Shaw and Professor Gustavo Sudre from the King's Maudsley Partnership for Children & Young People will lead an international team including, Professor Elizabeth Shephard from the University of Sao Paulo, Professor Georgina Krebs from University College London, Professor David Mataix-Cols from Karolinska and Dr Nick Sireau and Dr Margherita Zenoni from Orchard OCD.
"Families affected by OCD often ask whether it is possible to prevent the condition in the next generation," said Professor Mataix-Cols of Karolinska Institutet, one of the international centres involved in the project. "With the support of the Wellcome Trust, we will enhance and culturally adapt our prototype intervention for children at increased risk, and evaluate it in the UK and Brazil. Our ambition is to intervene before symptoms become disabling by equipping parents with practical, evidence-based tools that can reduce risk."
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder often emerges silently, with early warning signs that are difficult to interpret or act upon. By developing tools that can identify who is most at risk and when, this project has the potential to shift OCD from a condition we react to, to one we can anticipate and prevent. This represents a fundamental change in how we approach OCD: moving toward earlier intervention, personalised support, and ultimately better outcomes for children and families. Crucially, this research is grounded in lived experience and spans multiple countries, ensuring the solutions developed are both scientifically robust and truly meaningful to those affected.
Dr Nick Sireau, Co-founder and Trustee, Orchard OCD
The researchers have worked extensively with over 150 people with lived experience on the early stages of this study and will continue to work closely with those with lived experience of OCD as the research progresses to ensure the findings are meaningful and shared widely.
