Sequenced Treatment Effectiveness for Posttraumatic Stress

Summary

Individuals with PTSD are more likely to engage in unhealthy behaviors such as tobacco use, drug use, alcohol misuse, and have high rates of morbidity/mortality. PTSD negatively impacts marriages, educational attainment, and occupational functioning. Some patients with PTSD can be successfully referred to specialty mental health clinics, but most patients with PTSD cannot engage in specialty care because of geographical, financial and cultural barriers and must be treated in primary care. However, policy makers do not know the best way to treat PTSD in primary care clinics, especially for patients who do not respond to the initial treatment choice. There are effective treatments for PTSD that are feasible to deliver in primary care. These treatments include commonly prescribed antidepressants and brief exposure-based therapies. However, because there are no head-to-head comparisons between pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy in primary care settings, primary care providers do not know which treatments to recommend to their patients. In addition, despite high treatment non-response rates, very few studies have examined which treatment should be recommend next when patients do not respond well to the first, and no such studies have been conducted in primary care settings.

This trial will be conducted in Federally Qualified Health Centers and VA Medical Centers, where the prevalence of both past trauma exposure and PTSD are particularly high. The investigators will enroll 700 primary care patients. The investigators propose to 1) compare outcomes among patients randomized to initially receive pharmacotherapy or brief psychotherapy, 2) compare outcomes among patients randomized to treatment sequences (i.e., switching and augmenting) for patients not responding to the initial treatment and 3) examine variation in treatment outcomes among different subgroups of patients. Telephone and web surveys will be used to assessed outcomes important to patients, like self-reported symptom burden, side-effects, health related quality of life, and recovery outcomes, at baseline, 4 and 8 months. Results will help patients and primary care providers choose which treatment to try first and which treatment to try second if the first is not effective.

Conditions

• PTSD

Interventions

DRUG

Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor

Prescribers and patients choose among three selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI), sertraline, paroxetine, or fluoxetine based on patient's treatment history (i.e., failed SSRI trials due to side-effects or lack of efficacy) and preference. If a patient experiences problematic side effects after taking their choice of SSRI, the provider may switch them to another of the SSRI options during the first 8 weeks of follow-up. Patients on any antidepressant (including SSRIs) at enrollment will be cross-tapered over four weeks to either fluoxetine, sertraline or paroxetine (i.e., the old drug will be tapered down while the new drug is tapering up).

DRUG

Serotonin-norepinephrine reuptake inhibitor

Prescribers will prescribe venlafaxine.

BEHAVIORAL

Written Exposure Therapy

Written Exposure Therapy will be delivered during six 30 minute sessions. The first session includes psychoeducation about symptoms of PTSD, provides a treatment rationale for approaching the trauma memory, and discusses the use of writing as a means of doing so. In sessions 2-6, patients will write about the memory of their worst traumatic event for 20 minutes, with a focus on details of the event and thoughts and feelings that occurred during the event. Patients are directed to write about the same trauma memory during each session. The session ends with the therapist instructing the patient to allow themselves to experience any trauma-related memories, images, thoughts, and feelings in the interval between sessions. The therapist reads the narrative between sessions to make sure instructions were followed. Feedback about the narrative is provided to the patient at the beginning of sessions 3-6. This feedback is used to prompt the patient for writing in the current session.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Stanford University

  collaborator OTHER

• Boston University

  collaborator OTHER

• Washington State University

  collaborator OTHER

• Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute

  collaborator OTHER

• University of Washington

  lead OTHER

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

TREATMENT

Masking

SINGLE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

18 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

No

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2020-06-01

Primary Completion

2024-08-01

Completion

2024-08-01

FDA Drug

Yes

Countries

• United States

Study Locations