Predicting Treatment Failure in Regular Care Internet-Delivered Cognitive Behavior Therapy for Depression and Anxiety Using Only Weekly Symptom Measures

Objective: Therapist guided Internet-Delivered Cognitive Behavior Therapy (ICBT) is effective, but as in traditional CBT, not all patients improve, and clinicians generally fail to identify them early enough. We predict treatment failure in 12-week regular care ICBT for Depression, Panic disorder and Social anxiety disorder, using only patients' weekly symptom ratings to identify when the accuracy of predictions exceed 2 benchmarks: (a) chance, and (b) empirically derived clinician preferences for actionable predictions. Method: Screening, pretreatment and weekly symptom ratings from 4310 regular care ICBT-patients from the Internet Psychiatry Clinic in Stockholm, Sweden was analyzed in a series of regression models each adding 1 more week of data. Final score was predicted in a holdout test sample, which was then categorized into Success or Failure (failure defined as the absence of both remitter and responder status). Classification analyses with Balanced Accuracy and 95% Confidence intervals was then compared to predefined benchmarks. Results: Benchmark 1 (better than chance) was reached 1 week into all treatments. Social anxiety disorder reached Benchmark 2 (>65%) at week 5, whereas Depression and Panic Disorder reached it at week 6. Conclusions: For depression, social anxiety and panic disorder, prediction with only patient-rated symptom scores can detect treatment failure 6 weeks into ICBT, with enough accuracy for a clinician to take action. Early identification of failing treatment attempts may be a viable way to increase the overall success rate of existing psychological treatments by providing extra clinical resources to at-risk patients, within a so-called Adaptive Treatment Strategy. What is the public health significance of this article? The study suggests that clinically actionable predictions of treatment failure in ongoing therapist guided Internet-Delivered Cognitive Behavior Therapy can be made halfway through a 12-week long treatment using patient ratings on symptom severity as the only predictor. This means that such predictions could be performed with very simple methods, which would enable clinicians to monitor progress and use an adaptive treatment strategy for patients who are not benefitting from treatment.