Anxiety disorders

  • In Conversation

    In Conversation… Anxiety

    We spoke to Professor Cathy Creswell about some of the barriers to support for children with anxiety, the Anxiety and Depression in Young people research clinic, and her role as the lead for the Emerging Minds: Action for Child Mental Health research network.

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  • Anxiety Edition – foreword by Dr Mark Lovell

    This edition of The Bridge covers the topic of anxiety. Owing to anxiety being common, with all of us experiencing a state of anxiety at some time and many also having trait anxiety, it is no surprise that ACAMH’s two main academic outputs the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry and Child and Adolescent Mental Health contain some good quality research on anxiety advancing our knowledge of the science and evidence based practice.

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  • Adult ABMT protocols need adapting for effective use in children

    Attention bias modification treatment (ABMT) aims to target attention biases in threat processing in patients with anxiety1. While ABMT seems to be effective in adults with social anxiety disorder (SAD),2,3 its effect in youths with SAD and the potential treatment moderators are unclear. In 2016, Lee Pergamin-Hight and colleagues conducted a randomised controlled trial to explore the efficacy of ABMT in youths and the influence of possible moderators of treatment outcomes.

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  • Parent-led group CBT training can reduce anxiety in children

    A brief psychological intervention in which parents and carers are supported in applying cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) principles in their child’s day-to-day life can lead to good outcomes for child anxiety disorders, according to new research.

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  • FRIENDS programme reduced anxiety, but has no effect on school academic performance

    Professor Paul Stallard and colleagues have analysed data from the randomised controlled trial “Preventing Anxiety in Children through Education in Schools” that involved >1,300 children aged 9-10 years from 40 primary schools across England.

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  • MEG confirms hyper-vigilance followed by threat avoidance in children with anxiety disorder

    A key etiological factor of anxiety disorders is an altered pattern of threat processing, but its neurobiological basis is relatively unclear.

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  • Meta-analysis of secondary anxiety prevention

    Dr Peter Lawrence summarises the paper ‘Prevention of anxiety among at-risk children and adolescents – a systematic review and meta-analysis’

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  • Children with a Specific Phobia do better in Individual CBT than Group CBT and guided parent-led CBT

    Children often present to health care settings with highly impairing and disabling anxiety disorders, including Specific Phobia, Social Anxiety Disorder, Generalised Anxiety Disorder and Separation Anxiety Disorder.

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  • Effects of development must be considered when examining interpretation bias in children with anxiety

    Anxiety is often treated using interventions that target interpretation bias, but the link between interpretation bias and anxiety in children is unclear. Now, in a Research Review published in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, Suzannah Stuijfzand and colleagues have performed a meta-analysis of the literature to establish whether this association in children really does exist.

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  • Negative interpretation bias in adolescents with subclinical social anxiety disorder

    Social Anxiety Disorder (SAD) is a marked fear or anxiety of social situations where an individual may be exposed to possible scrutiny by others. Now, Yura Loscalzo and colleagues have examined the contribution of different components of interpretation bias — a model proposed to explain SAD whereby affected individuals systematically assign a threatening meaning to an objectively ambiguous stimulus with several possible interpretations.

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