AMX DAS-MI-0804 Manual de usuario descargar pdf (Pagina 7)

Abstract 7

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Abstract

The attempt of this study was to examine the influence of safety behavior in exposure

therapy in panic with agoraphobia patients. A new aspect of this study was its specific focus

on the amount of avoidance behavior patients showed before starting with therapy, which

should moderate safety behavior during exposure therapy. While focusing on this specific

aspect, additional moderators, mediators, and predictors for safety behavior and therapy-

outcome should be identified. Special attention was paid to differences that might occur

when the therapist accompanies the patient during exposure therapy vs. when not, when

patients have high anxiety ratings according to their bodily symptoms vs. low anxiety. Finally

we looked at the difference between patients who showed a lot of cognitive changes during

therapy in comparison to patients with no significant changes. This is the first study involving

the described factors in path analysis focusing on their impact on safety behavior and

therapy-outcome. Covariates like anticipatory anxiety and depression were considered in the

calculation. After the exclusion of drop-outs N = 242 patients were included into the analysis.

According to the findings of this study neither the amount of avoidance behavior before ex-

posure therapy nor therapist guided exposure could predict safety behavior showed during

exposure therapy. Furthermore, the path analysis could not show the expected relation

between safety behavior and therapy-outcome.

By contrast, the reduction of anxiety due to bodily symptoms and the change in cognitive

processes correlated significantly with therapy-outcome. The covariate anticipatory anxiety

showed a positive relation to safety behavior during exposure. As expected the amount of

depression when patients started therapy had no relation with safety behavior and therapy-

outcome.

These findings confirm that especially the reduction of anxiety due to bodily symptoms and

the change in cognitive processes are important elements of exposure therapy which is

proved to be the right procedure to treat panic with agoraphobia patients. The analysis

showed that safety behavior seems to play - against the formulated hypothesis - an inferior

role. Future studies should go on examining the role of safety behavior. In this work the

literature review could show that it would be interesting to put the focus on the accurate

definition of safety behavior in context with the type of anxiety disorder examined.

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AMX DAS-MI-0804 Manual de usuario Pagina 7