TMS + Exposure Therapy for Pediatric OCD: Second Phase

Pediatric OCD is a public health problem and many remain symptomatic even after receiving efficacious treatments. The success of exposure and response prevention (ERP), a first-line behavioral treatment, depends on the ability to refrain from compulsions during exposure tasks. Improving this "therapy critical behavior" is a potentially important strategy for ERP augmentation. Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) can be leveraged to stimulate healthier functioning of brain circuits underlying therapy critical behaviors. The overall objective of this project is to test whether augmenting ERP with rTMS over cortical nodes of select cortico-striatal circuits implicated in compulsivity can normalize connectivity and enhance response prevention in youth and young adults with OCD. This project will use a masked RCT design to test whether ERP+TMS engages hypothesized circuits involved in compulsivity and whether this leads to clinical improvement. Youth ages 12-21 years with OCD will complete a full course of ERP plus randomly assigned TMS regimens of sham or continuous theta burst stimulation (cTBS) to the presupplementary motor area (pSMA; n=30 per group).