Esther12
Senior Member
- Messages
- 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.