MICBT for Non-underweight Adults With Eating Disorders

Summary

Eating disorders (ED) are severe but treatable conditions, but there are large margin for improvements in terms of efficacy and adherence. There is room to explore new treatment options who are either more capable to retain patients in therapy, more effective. Alternative their efficacy may match the ones of current available treatments but offer new options to ones that did not respond to available therapies. Here the investigators explored if a combination of CBT-focused plus Metacognitive Interpersonal Therapy (MIT) is an empirically supported therapy for personality disorders and could be a new viable treatment option for non-underweight ED. MIT targets some aspects of ED such as poor awareness of mental states and maladaptive interpersonal schemas that are not included in the transdiagnostic model underlying the most investigated empirically supported treatment for ED that is CBT-E. It is reasonable therefore that targeting these aspects of psychopathology can be a path to treatment adherence and effectiveness

Conditions

• Eating Disorders
• Maladaptive Personality Trait
• Emotion Regulation
• Personality
• Personality Disorders
• Social Interaction
• Perfectionism
• Self Esteem
• Cognitive Dysfunction
• Dysfunctional Behavior, Psychology

Interventions

OTHER

CBT-F+MIT

The aim is to develop healthier strategies for managing negative thoughts and feelings antecedent to ED and for engaging patients in social interactions that meet their relational basic wishes. They will thus understand that perfectionism and the need for control they experience through ED are coping strategies developed within interpersonal patterns of interaction with significant others, where low self-esteem and emotive dysregulation play a central role. MIT aims to improve individuals' capacity to make sense of their own affect and cognitions and become aware of being driven by maladaptive, rigid and biased schemas about self and others, to form a richer understanding of the mind of the others and use this knowledge to react in more adaptive ways to social difficulties or evolutionary selected wishes. MIT also enables individuals to reflect on how these schemas may act as triggers for ED behavior and to develop more effective coping strategies in face of interpersonal stressors.

OTHER

CBT-E

In the first Stage, the treatment will be focused on achieving a shared understanding of the patient's eating disorder and the related maintenance factors. In this phase the patient will be helped to regulate and stabilize his eating habits and so to address his weight concerns. In the second stage, progress made is reviewed in detail. In the third stage, the sessions will be focused on the central processes that are maintaining the psychopathology of the patient's eating disorder. In particular, this involves in addressing concerns about weight and body shape, cognitive and caloric dietary restriction, events and emotions that affect nutrition. In phase three and four clinical perfection, low global self-esteem, intolerance of emotions and interpersonal difficulties are also addressed. Towards the end of the third stage and during the fourth stage, procedures will be also implemented to minimize the risk of short- and long-term relapse.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Centro Trattamento Integrato: Disturbi Alimentari e Obesita

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Gloria Fioravanti · Centro di Trattamento Integrato. Disturbi Alimentari e Obesità (CTI) di Gloria Fioravanti

• Raffaele Popolo · Centro di Terapia Metacognitiva Interpersonale, Roma

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

TREATMENT

Masking

SINGLE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

18 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

No

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2022-05-31

Primary Completion

2023-05-31

Completion

2024-11-30

Countries

• Italy

Study Locations