A 50-year-old woman with obsessive-compulsive disorder was supposed to restart clomipramine, a long-established OCD medication. Instead, a drug with a nearly identical name was entered into the electronic prescription system, and she spent 12 weeks taking clomiphene, a fertility drug. By her own account, her OCD symptoms dropped sharply.
The case, published in June in Case Reports in Psychiatry by Seyed Hamzeh Hosseini, Behnam Abbasi and Fatemeh Abedian Kenari of Mazandaran University of Medical Sciences in Iran, led the authors to ask whether hormones might influence OCD in some patients. They stress that causality cannot be established, and the report comes with major caveats about how her improvement was measured.
