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March/April 2008
by Bruce Fellman

Everyone has some degree of clutter on their desks and, yes, in their closets, attics, garages, and basements. “That’s perfectly normal,” says David F. Tolin, associate professor (adjunct) of psychiatry. “I’m rather messy myself.”

But some of Tolin’s patients have taken accumulation to pathological extremes. They live in houses choked with material most rational observers would term junk. Psychiatrists term this condition compulsive hoarding (CH). Tolin, who runs the Anxiety Disorders Center at the Institute of Living in Hartford, Connecticut, estimates that the number of sufferers could run “in the millions. It’s not a rare condition.”

People with CH can’t stop accumulating things, and they can’t part with their things. In a recent Internet survey, Tolin and his colleagues measured the dismal effect of CH on 665 family members and friends of hoarders. Children who grew up in such overly cluttered circumstances “rated their childhoods as less happy, reported more difficulty making friends, [and] had people over less often,” the researchers report in the January 3 online issue of Behaviour Research and Therapy. The survey also revealed that hoarding often led to rejection. “People who hoard tend to live pretty unhappy, socially isolated lives,” says Tolin.

Because CH was thought to be an obsessive-compulsive disorder, antidepressants were the treatment of choice. But the drugs often didn’t work. And studies at other institutions have shown significant differences between the brains of hoarders and OCD sufferers. “We’re now leaning towards seeing these as different conditions,” says Tolin. In an as-yet unpublished study using functional magnetic resonance imaging, Tolin’s team found that when hoarders looked at one of their possessions, the “thinking parts of the brain—the orbital frontal cortex—and memory centers in the hippocampus went on overdrive.”

This suggested that treatments aimed at cognition might work. Tolin and his colleagues showed that an extended course of cognitive behavioral therapy—24 weekly sessions—aimed at managing the condition helped. “A majority of patients showed clear improvement,” Tolin reported in Behaviour Research and Therapy in December. “They’re not cured, but they’re better able to deal with their hoarding problems.”  

Famine’s Mark

Photo ©Sebastian Steinfartz

Some of the marine iguanas from the Galapagos Islands have a secret hidden in their DNA: the signature of an environmental disaster. In 1997 and 1998, the area was hit by an intense El Nino. The periodic warming of the sea surface caused a famine among iguanas, vegetarians that live primarily on seaweed. In some places, 90 percent died.

In 2004, Yale ecologist Gisella Caccone and her colleagues sampled 11 different Galapagos iguana populations. When the team compared these with DNA samples taken before the El Nino, they found varying degrees of a drop in genetic diversity. The biggest reduction occurred on Marchena, an island that experienced a devastating volcanic eruption several years before the El Nino. Its iguanas have yet to recover, Caccone reports in the December Public Library of Science One. “Multiple stressors may have a synergistic effect on population,” she says.

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