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CBT meta-analysis for anxiety/depression questions value over other talking therapies

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13,774
Abstract

Despite the evidence suggesting that all treatments intended to be therapeutic are equally efficacious, the conjecture that one form of treatment, namely cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), is superior to all other treatment persists. The purpose of the current study was to (a) reanalyze the clinical trials from an earlier meta-analysis that compared CBT to ‘other therapies’ for depression and anxiety (viz, Tolin 2010) and (b) conduct a methodologically rigorous and comprehensive meta-analysis to determine the relative efficacy of CBT and bona fide non-CBT treatments for adult anxiety disorders. Although the reanalysis was consistent with the earlier meta-analysis’ findings of small to medium effect sizes for disorder-specific symptom measures, the reanalysis revealed no evidence for the superiority of CBT for depression and anxiety for outcomes that were not disorder-specific. Following the reanalysis, a comprehensive anxiety meta-analysis that utilized a survey of 91 CBT experts from the Association of Behavioral and Cognitive Therapists (ABCT) to consensually identify CBT treatments was conducted. Thirteen clinical trials met inclusion criteria. There were no differences between CBT treatments and bona fide non-CBT treatments across disorder-specific and non-disorder specific symptom measures. These analyses, in combination with previous meta-analytic findings, fail to provide corroborative evidence for the conjecture that CBT is superior to bona fide non-CBT treatments.
Highlights

► Reanalyzed studies from an earlier meta-analysis (viz, Tolin 2010) of CBT treatments ► Meta-analyzed the relative efficacy of CBT and non-CBT treatments for adult anxiety ► No differences between CBT and non-CBT for non-targeted measures in the re-analysis ► CBT experts were surveyed to consensually identify treatments as CBT or non-CBT ► No differences between CBT and bona fide non-CBT treatments for anxiety disorders

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027273581300007X

I've only read the abstract so can't really comment much (and I just accidentally deleted a longer post!), but thought that this could be of interest.

To me, the evidence of efficacy for CBT for anxiety looks much more solid than for anything else (and the thinking behind it fits with my own biases!), but it is still possible that it 'works' by just manipulating people's use of language in a way which improves scores for certain disorder specific questionnaires without having much real benefit for people's health.
 

biophile

Places I'd rather be.
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8,977
On a somewhat similar note:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19490745

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Cuijpers P, van Straten A, Bohlmeijer E, Hollon SD, Andersson G. The effects of psychotherapy for adult depression are overestimated: a meta-analysis of study quality and effect size. Psychol Med. 2010 Feb;40(2):211-23. doi: 10.1017/S0033291709006114. Epub 2009 Jun 3.

Department of Clinical Psychology, VU University Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. p.cuijpers@psy.vu.nl

BACKGROUND: No meta-analytical study has examined whether the quality of the studies examining psychotherapy for adult depression is associated with the effect sizes found. This study assesses this association.

METHOD: We used a database of 115 randomized controlled trials in which 178 psychotherapies for adult depression were compared to a control condition. Eight quality criteria were assessed by two independent coders: participants met diagnostic criteria for a depressive disorder, a treatment manual was used, the therapists were trained, treatment integrity was checked, intention-to-treat analyses were used, N >or= 50, randomization was conducted by an independent party, and assessors of outcome were blinded.

RESULTS: Only 11 studies (16 comparisons) met the eight quality criteria. The standardized mean effect size found for the high-quality studies (d=0.22) was significantly smaller than in the other studies (d=0.74, p<0.001), even after restricting the sample to the subset of other studies that used the kind of care-as-usual or non-specific controls that tended to be used in the high-quality studies. Heterogeneity was zero in the group of high-quality studies. The numbers needed to be treated in the high-quality studies was 8, while it was 2 in the lower-quality studies.*

CONCLUSIONS: We found strong evidence that the effects of psychotherapy for adult depression have been overestimated in meta-analytical studies. Although the effects of psychotherapy are significant, they are much smaller than was assumed until now, even after controlling for the type of control condition used.

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* Interestingly, based on previous studies on CFS, PACE predicted a NNT of 2 for CBT, but instead got 8.