Cognitive-behavioral Treatment of Anxiety/ Primary Care

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DESCRIPTION (provided by candidate): This Mentored Patient-Oriented Research Career Development Award (K23) will enable Dr. Weisberg to begin a programmatic line of research in the development and evaluation of intervention programs for medical patients with anxiety disorders. Her emphasis will be on developing a cognitive behavioral group treatment for primary care patients with anxiety disorders. Anxiety disorders are highly prevalent and impairing. Individuals seeking help for anxiety are more likely to be seen in primary care than in mental health settings, and the majority of these patients do not receive adequate treatment. Dr. Weisberg's training goals include: (1) broadening her knowledge and experience in treatment development, with a focus on developing and evaluating treatments for anxiety disorders in medical settings; (2) acquiring expertise in conducting interventions in primary care settings; (3) expanding her understanding of the conduct of treatment outcome studies; and (4) further developing her statistical skills, with particular emphasis on techniques relevant to intervention / clinical trials research. These training goals will be achieved through (1) the resources available at Brown Medical School; (2) the high quality mentorship provided by Drs. Martin Keller, Michelle Craske, Kay Dickersin, and the expertise of the assembled consultant team (Drs. David Barlow, Charles Eaton, and Robert Stout); (3) focused coursework, training, and clinical experiences; and (4) the proposed research project. The proposed research plan involves developing and empirically testing a new treatment for primary care patients with panic disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, and/or social anxiety disorder. The new treatment, Learning to Ease Anxiety in Primary care (LEAP) will incorporate methods universal to CBT for specific anxiety disorders (i.e., cognitive restructuring and exposure) and adapted for primary care patients with a range of anxiety diagnoses. The specific research aims are to: (1) develop the LEAP treatment, its manual, therapist training procedures, and treatment fidelity measures and (2) conduct a randomized, controlled pilot study comparing LEAP to treatment as usual, in order to evaluate the feasibility and acceptability of the proposed treatment, and obtain a treatment effect size to support an examination of the protocol in a future, larger trial.