Predicting Outcomes and Response to Therapy (PORT)

Summary

The Predicting Outcomes and Response to Therapy (PORT) study is aimed to test the degree to which cognitive and behavioural factors predict response to Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT).  

Participants who report current anxiety symptoms (GAD-7 score above the clinical cut-off) from the GLAD database will be recruited in PORT. Participants will complete a range of questionnaires and experimental paradigms that assess psychological factors thought to underlie response to CBT for anxiety. These include measures of cognitive and behavioural factors.

Our measures of cognitive factors assess both attentional and interpretational biases. The behavioural factors we assess include avoidance and fear learning/extinction. These will be delivered via online questionnaires and completion of our smartphone app FLARe (Fear Learning and Anxiety Response). Following this assessment, we will pass contact/personal details of suitable participants to Ieso Digital Health via their referral form and participants will receive a course of CBT from Ieso Digital Health. Ieso Digital Health will provide PORT with measures of treatment response and variables derived from transcripts of participants’ therapy sessions, which our cognitive and behavioural measures will be used to predict.

Finally, one month after completion of treatment, participants will be asked to complete a subset of the self-report measures as the last step of the study.  

Aimed outcomes of the project: 

Currently, psychological treatment for anxiety is effective approximately 50% of the time. Long term, we want to build predictive algorithms that allow us to work out what treatments work for whom and why. This should in time help us identify at the outset who is unlikely to respond well to psychological treatment, enabling alternative treatments to be considered and thus ultimately more effective treatment for those struggling with anxiety.  

Participation: 197 participants who are part of the Mental Health BioResource took part in this study which consisted of online questionnaires and experiments.  

Organisation: This study was organised by Professor Thalia Eley from King's College London.