In a new study, O’Driscoll et al. aimed to compare the influence of CBT and CfD on symptom change in a retrospective cohort of 12,756 individuals in England. The researchers used network intervention analysis to estimate post-treatment symptom change against baseline that was defined as either session 1 (initial assessment) or session 2 (first treatment). They found that CBT directly affected excessive worry, trouble relaxing and apprehensive expectation and had a stronger influence on the associated change between suicidal ideation and concentration. By contrast, CfD had a stronger direct influence on thoughts of being a failure and on the associated change between feeling annoyed and apprehensive expectation. “CBT was uniquely associated with changes in anxiety-related symptoms and therefore might be better suited to those individuals with depression who have comorbid anxiety,” explains Ciaran O’Driscoll, the first author of the paper.
Another important finding is that session 2 appears to be a more appropriate baseline than session 1 for measuring treatment-related symptom change. “If an effect is due to intervention, we would expect consistency between models with baseline sessions 1 and 2; however, these models produced very different results. As session 1 is an assessment session and session 2 an intervention, this suggests that there is some change occurring between these sessions that is not due to a specific treatment effect,” O’Driscoll adds.
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