Challenge to anorexia nervosa treatment guidelines
Urgent need for better targeted therapies
2021-02-16
(Press-News.org) New analysis published in The Lancet Psychiatry has shown a lack of strong evidence to support current guidance on psychological therapies for treating anorexia nervosa over expert treatment as usual.
The findings highlight a need for further research and support a call for individual trial data to be made available so the benefits of treatments in specific patient populations can be better understood.
Conducted by an international team of clinical experts and researchers, the analysis included 13 randomised controlled trials and a total of 1049 patients. The studies compared psychological therapies to treatment as usual in adults receiving outpatient treatment for anorexia. The trials measured eating disorder symptoms, body-mass index (BMI) and all-cause dropout rate up to 52 weeks of follow up.
The analysis found some therapies to have modest benefit to patients. However, the therapies, currently recommended by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) and in clinical guidelines internationally, were not shown to differ significantly from expert treatment as usual.
Professor Andrea Cipriani (University of Oxford), lead author on the project, says:
"Understanding the effectiveness of available treatments is particularly important for anorexia nervosa because it has one of the highest mortality rates of any psychiatric condition. This analysis highlights the gaps in existing evidence and the urgent need for more and better research into psychological therapies for treating Anorexia."
Because of the relatively low quality and quantity of data available, this analysis should be understood as exploratory rather than confirmatory. However, it highlights the shortcomings of existing research and emphasises the need for more robust data.
Professor Tracey Wade (Flinders University), lead collaborator on the project, says:
"We have made progress in understanding the effective non-specific factors that need to be included in any treatment for anorexia nervosa. Our future challenge is to develop treatment factors tailored to individual presentations that can be added to the non-specific factors to increase effectiveness of our treatments for the condition."
The research was funded by the NIHR Oxford Health Biomedical Research Centre, the University of Oxford and Flinders University.
* The psychological interventions included in the analysis include Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), family-oriented treatments, psychodynamic treatments, and other treatments such as Maudsley anorexia nervosa treatment for adults (MANTRA) and specialist supportive clinical management (SSCM).
* Treatment at usual varied between the trials included in the analysis and can involve several components delivered by many people. The poor description of treatment as usual was a limitation observed in most of the trials included in the analysis.
The paper, Comparative efficacy and acceptability of psychological interventions for the treatment of adult outpatients with anorexia nervosa: a systematic review and network meta-analysis, published in The Lancet Psychiatry will be available here http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanpsy/article/PIIS2215-0366(20)30566-6/fulltext.
INFORMATION:
[Attachments] See images for this press release:
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2021-02-16
Drilling a 270,000-year old core from a Tasmanian lake has provided the first Australian record of a major global event where the Earth's magnetic field 'switched '- and the opportunity to establish a precedent for developing new paleomagnetic dating tools for Australian archaeology and paleosciences.
"This is the first study of this kind in Australia since pioneering studies in the 1980s," said author Dr Agathe Lisé-Provonost, a McKenzie Fellow from the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Melbourne.
"Just two lakes in north-east Australia previously provided such "full-vector" record, where both the past directions and the past intensity of the Earth magnetic field are obtained from the same cores."
Published in the journal Quaternary Geochronology, Chronostratigraphy ...
2021-02-16
Milan, 15 February 2021 - Excitons are quasiparticles which can transport energy through solid substances. This makes them important for the development of future materials and devices - but more research is needed to understand their fundamental behaviour and how to manipulate it. Researchers at Politecnico di Milano in collaboration with the Institute of Photonics and Nanotechnologies IFN-CNR and a theory group from the Tsukuba University (Japan) and the Max Plank Institute for the Structure and Dynamics of matter (Hamburg, Germany), have discovered that an exciton can simultaneously adopt two radically different characters when it isstimulated ...
2021-02-16
The researchers of TPU together with their colleagues from Russian and foreign scientific centers have found a way to estimate the temperature of a chemical reaction activated by pseudo-particles - plasmons. Two organic molecules served as ultra-small sensors or thermometers. According to scientists, the experiments are of great fundamental importance: beyond the mere fact of evaluating the temperature with the use of molecules, it was possible to demonstrate that properties of plasmon serving as an activator of chemical reactions depend not only on thermal ...
2021-02-16
Certain plasma microRNAs could serve as diagnostic biomarkers in mild traumatic brain injury, a new study from the University of Eastern Finland shows. The biomarkers were discovered in an animal model and they were successfully used also to diagnose mild traumatic brain injury in a subgroup of patients. The study was published in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences.
Mild traumatic brain injury is difficult to detect by contemporary conventional imaging methods. In fact, most patients do not exhibit visible structural damage to the brain, which could ...
2021-02-16
The tiniest microchips yet can be made from graphene and other 2D-materials, using a form of 'nano-origami', physicists at the University of Sussex have found.
This is the first time any researchers have done this, and it is covered in a paper published in the ACS Nano journal.
By creating kinks in the structure of graphene, researchers at the University of Sussex have made the nanomaterial behave like a transistor, and have shown that when a strip of graphene is crinkled in this way, it can behave like a microchip, which is around 100 times smaller than conventional microchips.
Prof ...
2021-02-16
A cloud simulation that captures the development and evolution of clouds based on atmospheric physical processes is more accurate than other models.
"Our model describes atmospheric conditions and thermodynamic processes as well as the fluid dynamics that govern the motion of air in the atmosphere," says Torsten Hädrich, a KAUST Ph.D. student in the international research team. "This allows us to simulate cloud phenomena more realistically than previous methods."
The model can take known atmospheric information at any time, such as temperature, humidity and wind, and simulate cloud formation, which is used for "nowcasting" of imminent cloud phenomena.
"For example, our model is able to simulate the formation of cumulonimbus clouds by considering ...
2021-02-16
Scientists at Cardiff University have discovered a unique way to target a common virus that affects one in 200 newborn babies in the UK but for which there is only limited treatments available.
Human cytomegalovirus (HCMV) is a master at "hiding" from the body's immune system so antibodies and T-cells cannot attack it as they do in other viruses, like the current coronavirus.
The researchers have now discovered a new type of antibody in the lab which - instead of killing the virus directly - marks infected cells so the immune system can "see" them.
Once the immune system can see the infected cells it is able to kill the virus.
The team have submitted a patent for the unique immunotherapeutic and hope it can help to treat HCMV, which can leave newborn babies severely disabled or ...
2021-02-16
It does not happen often. But on rare occasions, physicians make mistakes and may make a wrong diagnosis. Patients may have many diseases all at once, where it can be difficult to distinguish the symptoms of one illness from the other, or there may be a lack of symptoms.
Errors in diagnosis may lead to incorrect treatment or a lack of treatment. Therefore, everyone in the healthcare system tries to minimise errors as much as possible.
Now, researchers at the University of Copenhagen have developed an algorithm that can help with just that.
'Our new algorithm can find the patients who have such an unusual disease trajectory that they may indeed not suffer from the disease ...
2021-02-16
Scientists have discovered that pollution concentration varies between seasons. A new study, conducted in the North China Plain, determined where volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are distributed within the vertical layers of the atmosphere, and found notable changes from winter to summer.
"The concentration of VOCs in the vertical direction was much higher in winter than that in summer and their emission sources showed different contributions in both seasons," said Guiqian Tang, associate professor in the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the corresponding author of a study just published in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences .
The researchers conducted a field campaign from June 8 to July 3, 2019. They focused ...
2021-02-16
Researchers have used the zebrafish (Danio rerio) to identify the role of a gene involved in cardiac rhythm, which could help explain the fundamentals of what it takes to make a human heartbeat.
The University of Melbourne study also found that mutation of the gene, Tmem161b, causes potentially fatal cardiac arrhythmia. 2.5 per cent of Australians are living with cardiac arrhythmia ( END ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] Challenge to anorexia nervosa treatment guidelines
Urgent need for better targeted therapies
