Attitudes Toward Family-Based Treatment Impact Therapists' Intent to Change Their Therapeutic Practice for Adolescent Anorexia Nervosa

Adaptation to family-based treatment for Medicaid-insured youth with anorexia nervosa in publicly-funded settings: Protocol for a mixed methods implementation scale-out pilot study

BACKGROUND

Family-based treatment (FBT) for anorexia nervosa is an evidence-based treatment, but its effectiveness is untested among socioeconomically disadvantaged and racially diverse youth. Adapting FBT may facilitate "scale-out" for Medicaid-insured youth served in publicly-funded settings and potentially improve outcomes for more diverse populations.

METHODS

This mixed methods effectiveness-implementation Hybrid Type 3 pilot study protocol included a planning period in collaboration with the San Francisco Department of Public Health, culminating in a two-day in-person FBT training for 25 therapists in the county, followed by the opportunity to engage in one year of weekly supervision. The training incorporated FBT adaptations intended to improve fit for low-income families within community-based settings. Treatment appropriateness and acceptability will be measured immediately post-training. Following the training, cases referred for FBT will only be assigned to the trained clinicians who voluntarily opted into long-term group supervision. Clinicians treating at least one FBT case during the supervision period will report on implementation, adaptations, and patient weight gain. Finally, semi-structured interviews with clinician participants will be conducted, focused on implementation challenges and facilitators, local treatment adaptations, and overall satisfaction with FBT.

DISCUSSION

Learning about clinician adaptations will advance knowledge about treatment of eating disorders in publicly-funded community clinics, which serve a racially/ethnically and socioeconomically diverse group of youth. This project is designed to accelerate FBT implementation in publicly-funded mental health systems, and inform service improvements for underserved youth with eating disorders.

A brief session-by-session measure of eating disorder psychopathology for children and adolescents: Development and psychometric properties of the Eating Disorder-15 for Youth (ED-15-Y)

OBJECTIVE

Despite evidence supporting the use of measures to track ongoing progress and outcome in treatment, there is a relative absence of measures that are appropriate for this purpose in youth with eating disorders. This study examined the psychometric properties of the Eating Disorder-15 for Youth (ED-15-Y) scale, including its ability to detect short-term change in symptomatology.

METHOD

Youth (N = 203) ages 8-18 years completed self-report questionnaires and semi-structured diagnostic interviews upon initial presentation for an outpatient eating disorders assessment at an academic medical center.

RESULTS

The ED-15-Y demonstrated excellent reliability (internal consistency, split-half reliability) and high sensitivity to change early in treatment (change from sessions 1 to 8, adjusting for baseline score). Further, these data demonstrate that the ED-15-Y has excellent convergent validity, being highly correlated with a well-tested, longer measure of eating disorders psychopathology-the Eating Disorders Examination-Questionnaire (EDE-Q). These data also support good discriminant and concurrent validity, differentiating between youth without an eating disorder or with ARFID and youth with eating disorders involving weight and shape concerns (e.g., anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa).

DISCUSSION

The ED-15-Y may be a useful tool to briefly assess eating disorder psychopathology in youth as young as 8 years old. Its sensitivity to change very early in treatment suggests that it has the potential to be used as a routine outcome measure in the context of treatment.