Background: The presence of childhood trauma was expected to have an impact on obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) patients in different ways.

Objectives: to investigate the prevalence of childhood trauma among OCD patients and to understand the relation between OCD and the experience of childhood traumatic events.

Subjects and methods: This cross-sectional study included 101 OCD cases. The sample was selected from the patients attending outpatient clinic of Zagazig university hospitals who were diagnosed & classified according to DSM-IV (SCID_I). They were subjected to: Socio-demographic data, Yale-Brown OC Scale (Y-BOCS), Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ-28).

Results: The prevalence of childhood trauma in the studied group was 74.3% distributed as follows; 24.8% emotional abuse, then physical abuse was 20.8%, sexual abuse was 16.8%, and finally 11.9% of patients reported emotional & physical neglect. There was no variance in demographic parameters between cases with and without a previous history of emotional, physical, and sexual abuse (p>0.05), except a significantly higher percentage of females exposed to childhood sexual abuse and a higher percentage of males exposed to physical abuse. There was no correlation between obsessive-compulsive symptom severity and the history of experiencing childhood trauma in our study (p>0.05), except the exposure to childhood sexual abuse.



Conclusion: About 74.3% of the OCD patients in our sample reported experiencing childhood traumatic events. Females are more likely to be exposed to childhood sexual abuse, while males are more likely to experience childhood physical abuse. The exposure to previous history of sexual abuse is significantly associated with increased OCD severity.