Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy not effective for patients with OCD

Patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder generally do not benefit from mindfulness-based cognitive therapy, or MBCT, according to study results published in Psychiatry Research.

“In patients with OCD who have not responded to [cognitive behavioral therapy], the adaptation of the standard 8-week MBCT program is unlikely to produce beneficial changes in daily life experience concerning positive affect, negative affect, distress caused by [obsessive-compulsive] symptoms or acceptance of emotional state,” Sarah Landmann, Dipl.-Psych, of the department of psychiatry and psychotherapy at University Medical Center Freiburg in Germany, and colleagues wrote. “For this patient group, the standard 8-week program may be insufficient to develop a mindful stance in everyday life.”

According to Landmann and colleagues, clinical practice guidelines recommend CBT as the psychotherapeutic treatment of first choice for OCD, but a substantial proportion of patients do not respond sufficiently to treatment. Thus, researchers have sought methods for improving treatment response, with increasing attention paid to mindfulness-based approaches in the last decade.

In the present study, the researchers recruited a sample of 38 patients with OCD and residual symptoms following CBT and examined changes in daily life experiences following MBCT. They randomly assigned 17 to an MBCT group, as well as 21 to a psychoeducational group as an active control condition. For six times a day across 6 consecutive days before and after treatment, both groups underwent ecological momentary assessment.

Landmann and colleagues found that MBCT participation did not result in significant changes of positive affect, negative affect, acceptance of momentary emotions or distress associated with obsessive-compulsive symptoms when compared with the psychoeducational group. Further, those in the psychoeducational group experienced significant improvement regarding insight into the unreasonableness of obsessive-compulsive symptoms compared with the MBCT group. Although those in the MBCT group experienced an improved ability to detach from obsessive-compulsive symptoms in the moments in which they occur, the researchers concluded that the results do not indicate favorable changes in everyday life experiences of patients with OCD following MBCT.

“Future research on the effectiveness of MBCT for OCD should incorporate different treatment durations in their designs to examine the dose-response relationship for detecting changes in both symptom severity and in daily life experiences,” the researchers wrote. – by Joe Gramigna

Disclosures: The authors report no relevant financial disclosures.