PARIS, Oct 29: Two French scientists say they’ve come, quite accidentally, with a solution to Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) that involves implanting electrodes destined originally to control Parkinson’s disease.

OCD affects one adult in 50, with “twice that many having had it at some point in their lives,” the study says.

The disorder manifests itself in a number of ways, with sufferers becoming so excessive in their behaviour that they are known to spend hours washing their hands, or doing such things — “which make no sense at all,” says the OCD Foundation.

It’s as though the OCD sufferer’s brain “gets stuck on a particular thought or urge and just can’t let go.” People with OCD often describe their symptoms “as a case of mental hiccups that won’t go away.

OCD is, says the Foundation, a medical brain disorder that causes problems in information-processing, and is in no way the result of a “weak” or unstable personality, as was often thought in the past.

And although better treatment than ever is available to OCD sufferers, the disorder “is completely curable only in some individuals, with most people achieving meaningful and long-term symptom relief with comprehensive treatment.”

Two French researchers with INSERM — the Paris-based Institut National de la Sante et de la Recherche Medicale — say, however, that they’ve come up with a cure that could prove to be the much sought-after panacea to obsessive-compulsive disorder.

And, strangely enough, the cure they’ve come up with came quite accidentally as the two men — Yves Agid and Luc Mallet — were working on coming up with a solution to another often mysterious ailment, Parkinson’s disease.

Agid and Mallet, both of whom work for INSERM’s unit 299, say that the electrodes they implanted in two patients suffering from Parkinson’s disease also happened to “reduce considerably the compulsions and obsessions” with which they were also affected. And this, they say, because the electrodes were implanted in the part of the brain which controls the way our bodies move about.