Psychological and pharmacological treatments for generalized anxiety disorder (GAD): a meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials

Abstract

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The effectiveness of Internet‐delivered treatment for generalized anxiety disorder: An updated systematic review and meta‐analysis

“…Specifically, we aimed to systematically review all evidence for Internet‐delivered interventions targeting GAD and thereby update a systematic review and meta‐analysis conducted by Richards et al (2015). While there are several recent meta‐analyses of psychological treatments of GAD, some of which included Internet‐delivered interventions (e.g., Carl et al, 2020; Chen et al, 2019; Hall et al, 2016), none specifically set out to evaluate all available evidence for Internet‐delivered interventions (e.g., they only included iCBT, focused only on specific subgroups like older adults, or Internet‐delivered interventions were included alongside other self‐help and face‐to‐face interventions).…”

“…As Internet‐delivered treatments are developing fast and we have been aware of a number of new developments in the area of Internet‐delivered treatments for GAD (e.g., Dahlin et al, 2016; Richards et al, 2016), we wanted to build on the work of Richards et al (2015) and provide a fresh look at the available treatment options and their effectiveness. In doing so, we also strived to offer an in‐depth look at some moderators that may influence the effectiveness of Internet‐delivered treatments for GAD; for example, type of control group used (Zhu et al, 2014), specific intervention characteristics like theoretical orientation, composition or length of the treatment (Zhang et al, 2019), sample characteristics (Carl et al, 2020), and support offered (Wright et al, 2019). There were therefore two questions that guided our review (Eilert et al, 2019): Are Internet‐delivered treatments effective in treating symptoms of GAD when compared to control conditions?…”

Digital phenotyping of complex psychological responses to the COVID-19 pandemic

“…Indeed, a focus at the National Institute of Mental Health has been on approaching disorders in a dimensional way that does not rely on disorder categories, but instead draws on "big data" -or large clinical datasets -to understand underlying mechanisms of health and illness 26,27 . The data reported here are an important first step in the effort to understand symptom clusters associated with the pandemic to eventually guide the discovery of pathogenic mechanisms and inform personalized interventions that maximize treatment benefit [28][29][30] .…”

Development and evaluation of an internet-based treatment for generalized anxiety disorder : An acceptance-based approach

“…GAD can be treated with medication or psychological treatments. The recommended first line medication is selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) which is effective for reducing GAD symptoms and more tolerable than other types of medications for anxiety symptoms (Carl, Witcraft, et al, 2020;Tyrer & Baldwin, 2006). Even with a growing number of psychological treatment studies on GAD based on different theoretical orientations, the recommended psychological treatment for GAD is cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT).…”