Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy and Escitalopram for Generalized Anxiety Disorder(GAD)
Status:
Completed
Trial end date:
2008-07-01
Target enrollment:
Participant gender:
Summary
The goals of this pilot study are as follows:
1) To disseminate and examine the effectiveness of a manualized, individual,
cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy (CBT) for adults with Generalized Anxiety Disorder(GAD),
2) to test the effectiveness of augmentation (the addition of) antidepressant therapy in
participants who do not fully respond to CBT, and 3) to examine individual and clinical
predictors of non-response to CBT and predictors of response to augmentation antidepressant
therapy. A related goal is to examine the maintenance of treatment gains obtained from CBT
alone and CBT with augmentation antidepressant therapy, over a twenty-four month follow-up
period. This study will serve as a pilot investigation in preparation for a larger federally
funded study using this treatment approach. We hypothesize that CBT will result in remission
(no longer having GAD) and/or high endstate functioning (clinically meaningful improvement)
in approximately 40-50% of participants. Further, we hypothesize that augmentation
antidepressant therapy in participants who do not fully respond to CBT will result in further
clinically significant improvement.