Regular Research ArticlesModular Psychotherapy for Anxiety in Older Primary Care Patients
Section snippets
Participants
Patients were 31 adults at least 60 years old with a principal (e.g., most severe) or coprincipal diagnosis of GAD or ADNOS diagnosed according to the Anxiety Disorders Interview Schedule for Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (ADIS18) administered by a Ph.D.-level clinician. Recruitment was conducted from August 2004 to August 2005 using a primary care screening procedure and self-referrals. A screening questionnaire consisting of the two GAD items from the
Outcomes
Results from the outcome analyses are presented in Table 3. We found substantial and comparable decreases in anxiety, worry, and depressive symptoms and improvement in mental health-related quality of life in both the community treatment and modular psychotherapy groups. This pattern of results did not change when medication use was removed from the models. The within-group mean effect size (weighted average Hedges' g) for change in worry and anxiety symptoms for the modular psychotherapy
CONCLUSIONS
In a comparison between a modular form of psychotherapy and enhanced community treatment (in which patients and their primary care providers were given information about their anxiety diagnosis), both groups experienced equivalent symptomatic improvement. Substantial, statistically significant improvements were found in anxiety symptoms, worry, depressive symptoms, and mental health-related quality of life in both groups.
Individuals in both conditions used a wide variety of anxiety management
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The authors gratefully acknowledge the contributions of Georgia Birchler, Debora Goodman, Dilip V. Jeste, M.D., Laura Otis, Ph.D., and Murray B. Stein, M.D., M.P.H. This research was supported by NIMH grant MH067643.