NCT02460536

Attention Bias Modification Treatment (ABMT) for Anxiety Disorders in Youth

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 100 (actual)
• Sponsor: Tel Aviv University · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 10 Years – 18 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Not accepted

Summary

Attention biases in threat processing have been assigned a prominent role in the etiology and maintenance of anxiety disorders. Attention Bias Modification Treatment (ABMT) utilizes computer-based protocols to implicitly modify biased attentional patterns in anxious patients. This is a double-blind randomized controlled trial of ABMT for clinically anxious 10-18 year-olds. Participants will be assessed using clinical interviews and parent- and self-rated questionnaires before, in the middle and after twelve sessions of ABMT or control groups, and again at ten-week follow-up. Outcome measures will be anxiety symptoms and depression as measured by gold standard questionnaires as well as structured clinical interviews with youth and their parents. Attentional threat bias, Attentional control and interpretation of ambiguous information will also be measured to explore potential mediators of ABMT's effect on anxiety. The investigators expect the findings to inform pathways to treatments for anxious children and to provide initial information on mechanisms of ABMT efficacy.

Conditions

• Anxiety Disorders

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
BEHAVIORAL	Attention Bias Modification treatment (ABMT)	Attention training via repeated trials of a dot-probe task intended to direct attention away from threat stimuli using threat and neutral face stimuli.
BEHAVIORAL	Exposure only +ABMT	Identical discrimination task including exposure to a single threat or neutral face stimulus in each trial.
BEHAVIORAL	Attention training only +ABMT	Attention training via repeated trials of a dot-probe task using non-emotional stimuli.
BEHAVIORAL	Placebo group	Identical discrimination task including a single non-emotional stimulus in each trial.

Timeline

• Start date: 2015-05-01
• Primary completion: 2018-05-01
• Completion: 2018-05-01
• First posted: 2015-06-02
• Last updated: 2018-09-18

Locations

1 site across 1 country: Israel