Amount and frequency of psychotherapy as predictors of treatment outcome for adult depression: A meta-regression analysis

作者：Markéta Čihařová, Eirini Karyotaki, Clara Miguel, Esther Walsh, Nino de Ponti, Arpana Amarnath, Wouter van Ballegooijen, Heleen Riper, Bruce Arroll, Pim Cuijpers · 发表于：Journal of Affective Disorders · 年份：2024 · DOI：10.1016/j.jad.2024.05.070 · 被引用次数：30 · 研究领域：Psychotherapy Techniques and Applications、Digital Mental Health Interventions、Treatment of Major Depression

BACKGROUND: It is not clear whether the amount and frequency of psychotherapy is associated with treatment effects for adult depression. We investigated whether a number of indicators of the amount and frequency of psychotherapy were related to the treatment effects in randomized controlled trials (RCTs) comparing individual, face-to-face psychotherapy to a control group (e.g., care-as-usual [CAU] or waitlist condition [WL]). METHODS: Four databases were systematically searched, and meta-regression analyses conducted to assess the relationship between the effect size (Hedges' g) of the treatment and number of sessions, duration of psychotherapy, total contact time with the therapist, and number of sessions per week. RESULTS: We included 176 studies (210 comparisons) with 15,158 participants. We did not find a relationship between the effect size, and number of sessions, or total contact time. There was a small negative association between duration of treatment and the effect size, an additional week of treatment was related to a 0.014 decrease in the effect size. In addition, there was a strong association between number of sessions per week and the effect size, an increase from one to two sessions per week was related to an effect size higher by 0.596. Both associations were no longer significant when controlling for characteristics of studies. LIMITATIONS: The current findings are correlational, future research should thus address this question in an RCT. CONCLUSIONS: We sh...