Latency to treatment seeking in patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder: Results from a large multicenter clinical sample

•Latency to treatment refers to the time lag between the awareness of discomfort and/or impairment caused by OCD symptoms and the beginning of OCD-specific treatment awareness of discomfort and/or impairment.•Latency to treatment among patients with OCD is a complex phenomenon, which is influenced by several socio-demographic and clinical characteristics not fully independent from each other.•To better understand the effect of socio-demographic and clinical characteristics on latency to treatment in a large clinical sample of patients with OCD, we built an interval-censored survival model which allows to determine the relationship between all investigated variables simultaneously.•Longer LTT was associated with older age, early onset of OCD symptoms, presence of contamination/cleaning symptoms and full-time employment. Therefore, strategies for reducing LTT in OCD should focus on patients with these characteristics.