An imbalance in the neurotransmitters, or chemicals in the brain, in the brain’s frontal regions responsible for maintaining the excitation-inhibition equilibrium in these regions has been found in people with obsessive-compulsive disorder, or OCD.
Glutamate is an “excitatory” neurochemical allowing electrical impulses to send information across brain networks, whereas GABA is the “inhibitory” one, dampening neural excitation and thereby, creating and maintaining a balance.
In OCD sufferers, the glutamate-GABA balance was “disrupted” in two regions of the brain’s cerebral cortex, both fundamentally involved in deciding the balance between our conscious goals and more automatic habits, the University of Cambridge (UK) research showed.Using magnetic resonance spectroscopy, the researchers found heightened glutamate and lowered GABA levels in one of these cerebral cortical regions, the anterior cingulate cortex, of people with OCD than in those without.
