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Pfeiffer 2026 findings on Misophonia comorbidities

In a 2026 study, Pfeiffer et al. attempted to characterize the prevalence and clinical phenomenology of probable misophonia in treatment-seeking youth by administering a multi-domain self-report battery to N = 214 children and adolescents (ages 10–21) across four inpatient and outpatient mental health care facilities in Germany and Austria. In the probable misophonia subsample, nearly all participants (96.97%) reported clinically significant co-occurring symptoms in at least one other symptom domain, with anxiety being most prevalent (84.85%), followed by depression (78.79%), PTSD (68.18%), and OCD (66.67%). Compared to the non-misophonia group, the probable misophonia group scored significantly higher on all co-occurring symptom severity measures (depression, PTSD, anxiety, OCD, and irritability) with the largest between-group difference observed for OCD symptoms. In the regression analysis, depression and OCD were the only independent predictors of misophonia symptom severity when controlling for all other clinical variables, though a substantial portion of variance remained unexplained, supporting the authors' position that misophonia may represent a distinct construct beyond existing diagnostic categories (Pfeiffer et al., 2026).