Adherence Priming clinical trials

Microtuning a Bonafide Treatment for GAD Patients - A Randomized Controlled Trial.

Background: Psychotherapy is an effective treatment for generalized anxiety disorder in comparison to no-treatment controls. Instead of creating more and more new overall treatment-packets within a medical meta-model, a complementary approach to investigate clinical research designs may lie into the understanding of already effective psychotherapies. Treatment manuals and protocols allow a relatively high degree of freedom of therapists' behaviors on how to implement the overall treatment manuals. There is a lack of systematical knowledge of how therapists have to customize these overall protocols. The present design experimentally examines 3 types of conducting a 15 session time-limited cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) protocol and its relation to the therapists' protocol adherence and treatment efficacy. Methods/design: This trial investigates 3 different types of how to customize a well-introduced CBT-protocol using dyadic peer tutoring methodology (primings). The individuals with GAD are randomly assigned to 3 priming conditions (resource priming vs. supportive resource priming vs. adherence priming). Participants' treatment allocation is performed randomly, therapist's assignment to the peer tutoring partner and the priming condition is based on mutual agreement. Treatment outcomes are assessed at following levels: Observer based in-session outcomes, post-session outcomes from session 1 to 15, treatment outcome at post assessment and at 6-months follow-up assessments.