Is Exposure Necessary? A Randomized Clinical Trial of Interpersonal Psychotherapy for PTSD
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: Exposure to trauma reminders has been considered imperative in psychotherapy for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The authors tested interpersonal psychotherapy (IPT), which has demonstrated antidepressant efficacy and shown promise in pilot PTSD research as a non-exposure-based non-cognitive-behavioral PTSD treatment. METHOD: The authors conducted a randomized 14-week trial comparing IPT, prolonged exposure (an exposure-based exemplar), and relaxation therapy (an active control psychotherapy) in 110 unmedicated patients who had chronic PTSD and a score >50 on the Clinician-Administered PTSD Scale (CAPS). Randomization stratified for comorbid major depression. The authors hypothesized that IPT would be no more than minimally inferior (a difference <12.5 points in CAPS score) to prolonged exposure. RESULTS: All therapies had large within-group effect sizes (d values, 1.32-1.88). Rates of response, defined as an improvement of >30% in CAPS score, were 63% for IPT, 47% for prolonged exposure, and 38% for relaxation therapy (not significantly different between groups). CAPS outcomes for IPT and prolonged exposure differed by 5.5 points (not significant), and the null hypothesis of more than minimal IPT inferiority was rejected (p=0.035). Patients with comorbid major depression were nine times more likely than nondepressed patients to drop out of prolonged exposure therapy. IPT and prolonged exposure improved quality of life and social functioning more than relaxation therapy. CONCLUSIONS: This study demonstrated noninferiority of individual IPT for PTSD compared with the gold-standard treatment. IPT had (nonsignificantly) lower attrition and higher response rates than prolonged exposure. Contrary to widespread clinical belief, PTSD treatment may not require cognitive-behavioral exposure to trauma reminders. Moreover, patients with comorbid major depression may fare better with IPT than with prolonged exposure.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".