Project Details
Projekt
A Stepwise Psychotherapy Intervention for Reducing Risk in Coronary Artery Disease - a randomized controlled trial
Subject Area
Clinical Psychiatry, Psychotherapy, Child and Adolescent Psychiatry
Term
from 2008 to 2016
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 53387534
In patients with coronary artery disease (CAD), depressive symptoms are frequent and highly relevant for quality of life, health behaviour, health care costs, and prognosis. The aim of the ongoing study is to evaluate the effects of a psychotherapy intervention on symptoms this depression in patients with CAD. Therefore, depressed CAD patients are randomised into a controlled intervention trial, comparing a stepwise psychotherapy intervention with usual cardiological care. The manualised psychotherapy intervention starts with three individual sessions. In case of persisting symptoms, patients receive an additional 25 sessions of psychodynamic and cognitive-behavioural group psychotherapy over a total period of one year. The psychodynamic approach was chosen in order to specifically take into account personality traits such as negative affectivity and social inhibition, the components of the Type D personality, which may explain why recent cognitive behavioural psychotherapy (CBT) trials produced only small effects in depressed CAD patients. We expect that the intervention will reduce depressive symptoms as well as the prevalence of depressive disorders. It will also improve both behaviourally and physiologically mediated cardiovascular risk indicators, promote better quality of life, and reduce healthcare costs. Subgroup analyses will be performed in order to identify gender-specific treatment effects, effects on immunological stress reactivity, and genetic predictors of treatment success.
DFG Programme
Clinical Trials
