My First Attempt at Translating a Research Paper

I’d like to start off by saying that I may have lied. This is not my first attempt at translating a medical research paper, although it is my first successful attempt. Last summer, I attended a two-week summer session at Burke NeuroAcademy with Dr. Dianna Willis. In preparation, I tried to read one of her research papers. I would like to say that I fared pretty well, but unfortunately (and a little embarrassingly) I struggled to get past the first two sentences. 

So with that in mind, I picked a paper on OCD to try and interpret, as I hoped that this would be written in a more common vernacular. It was called Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD): A Comprehensive Review of Diagnosis, Comorbidities, and Treatment Approaches by Abhimanyu Singh, Vaibhav P. Anjankar, and Bhagyesh Sapkale. That being said, I am no expert on OCD. The most I know about Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is that it often causes one to feel that some things need to be done or arranged in a certain way (I’m cringing by my use of the word “things”, but unfortunately I’m too unsure of the exact definition to feel comfortable placing a more specific noun).

The abstract did exactly what I anticipated: summarized the study, observations, and conclusions. The most surprising revelation was that I managed to get through the abstract and understand what it was saying. Some big points that I grasped were that OCD often occurs along with another condition, like anxiety or schizophrenia, OCD is often misdiagnosed, and OCD has limited therapies, so new treatments are necessary.

I was less successful in the intro and background section. I came across and sat at a sentence for a good 5 minutes, unable to decipher its meaning: “The cortico-striatal circuitry's neurological correlates and hypotheses about an imbalance between goal-directed and habitual behavior are analyzed and contrasted with metacognitive views.” Originally, I thought that it was the terms. So, I googled the “cerebral cortex”, the “cortico-striatal circuit", and “metacognitive”. “Metacognitive” was straightforward enough, but searches for the “cerebral cortex” and the “cortico-striatal circuit" only gave me the definition in terms that I still didn’t know. I finally refined my search to “corpus striatum what does it do”, and I managed to connect the dots: the cortico-striatal circuit connects two parts of the brain that carry out similar functions of thinking, learning, decision making, and voluntarily moving. However, these definitions still didn’t finish the puzzle of the sentence. Plugging them back into the sentence and paraphrasing it, I found that I still struggled with the grammar of the last part of the sentence. At that time, however, I decided that I had spent far too long on 1 sentence, so I took my best guess at its meaning and moved on. My time is valuable. 

By the time I finished the abstract, I had 2 major impressions. First, it’s absolutely devastating how many people deal with OCD. Statistics say that 1.5% of adult females and 1% of adult males suffer from OCD. While this does not seem substantial, putting it in perspective of the world population approximates the 1.5% to represent around 121.5 million and the 1% to be around 80 million. Second, for a condition that makes its way into conversation so often, I find it shocking that we have such a paucity (I love that word) of information around treating it. There are many treatment options, but none are absolute, and OCD symptoms will never truly go away. Some treatments won’t work on all people, and the fact that OCD is often compiled with other conditions makes it even harder to recognize and take care of. 

From the review, I realized that this paper was more of an evaluation of all previous research on OCD rather than introducing new research. They started with 49 papers, and through a process of filtering and eliminating, narrowed the database to 30 papers to base this one off of. Again, I took away 2 main points from this section. First, OCD is more professionally understood as behaviors that one feels that they are obligated to accomplish. These compulsive behaviors are not pleasant nor exciting, but one may worry that not carrying it out will result in anxiety, thus severely impacting a person’s quality of life. With the exception of my improper vernacular, I think my original guess at the definition was pretty accurate! Second, there exist many methods of treating OCD, including cognitive behavioral treatment, deep brain stimulation, and antipsychotic drugs. However, different people will often respond in different ways, making it difficult to take a confident stance on the effectiveness of a treatment. In addition, schizophrenia has many similar symptoms, just as depression, anxiety, and ADHD have a high correlation with OCD, but they are all approached and treated in different ways. That, and the fact that OCD is often seen in addition to another condition, makes it incredibly difficult to address OCD, emphasizing the necessity for more information and research on this.