Internet-Delivered Exposure-Based Therapy for Symptom Preoccupation in Atrial Fibrillation: Uncontrolled Pilot Trial
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most common cardiac arrhythmia in the adult population. AF is associated with a poor quality of life (QoL) and, in many patients, current medical treatments are inadequate in alleviating AF symptoms (eg, palpitations). Patients often present with symptom preoccupation in terms of symptom fear, avoidance, and control behaviors. Internet-delivered cognitive behavior therapy is effective for treating other somatic disorders but has never been evaluated in patients with AF. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study is to evaluate the efficacy and feasibility of AF-specific internet-delivered cognitive behavior therapy. METHODS: We conducted an uncontrolled pilot study in which 19 patients with symptomatic paroxysmal AF underwent internet-delivered cognitive behavior therapy. Participants completed self-assessments at pretreatment, posttreatment, and at a 6-month follow-up along with handheld electrocardiogram measurements with symptom registration. The treatment lasted 10 weeks and included exposure to physical sensations, reduction in avoidance behavior, and behavioral activation. RESULTS: We observed large within-group improvements in the primary outcome, AF-specific QoL (Cohen d=0.80; P<.001), and in symptom preoccupation (Cohen d=1.24; P<.001) at posttreatment; the results were maintained at the 6-month follow-up. Treatment satisfaction and adherence rates were also high. We observed an increased AF burden, measured by electrocardiogram, at the 6-month follow-up, but a significant decrease was observed in the overestimation of AF symptoms at posttreatment and 6-month follow-up. Exploratory mediation analysis showed that a reduction in symptom preoccupation mediated the effects of internet-delivered cognitive behavior therapy on AF-specific QoL. CONCLUSIONS: This study presents preliminary evidence for the potential efficacy and feasibility of a novel approach in treating patients with symptomatic AF with internet-delivered cognitive behavior therapy. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT02694276; https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT02694276.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 it