How Cognitive Behavior Therapy Is Most Effective for Treating Generalized Anxiety Disorder

For the long term, CBT is more effective than other psychotherapies for treating GAD.
Based on a comprehensive review and meta-analysis, cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) is the recommended first-line psychotherapy for generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) because of its acute and long-term efficacy and acceptability.

There hasn’t been a comprehensive investigation on the best kind of psychotherapy for general anxiety disorder (GAD), despite the fact that the general benefits of psychotherapies have been extensively reported. This prompted researchers to assess the acceptability and short- and long-term efficacy of eight psychotherapies for the treatment of GAD in adults.

The researchers searched publishing databases from their founding until December 2022 for randomized clinical trials (RCTs) of psychotherapies for people whose primary diagnosis was GAD. They then performed a systematic review and network meta-analysis of these databases. 66 RCTs’ worth of data were included, and the researchers discovered that 23 of the trials had a significant risk of bias.

A total of 5597 patients  were evaluated out of the 66 included studies. Treatments ranged in duration from one to twelve weeks, with an average follow-up of twenty-five weeks and an average of eleven (SD, five) sessions.

CBT ought to be the primary option for treating generalized anxiety disorder because of the trade-off between acceptability and effectiveness, long-term efficacy, and confidence in the quality of the evidence.

The researchers discovered a moderate degree of relaxation therapy-associated improvement in GAD symptoms when compared to standard care and waiting lists. The efficiency of the various psychotherapies did not significantly differ from one another. Researchers also discovered that there were no appreciable differences between the psychotherapies under analysis in terms of relative risks for all-cause discontinuation, which is a proxy for acceptability.