Stages of change, treatment outcome and therapeutic alliance in adult inpatients with chronic anorexia nervosa

BMC Psychiatry

Research Article

Martin Teufel¹  Stephan Zipfel¹  Katharina Keifenheim¹  Johannes Mander¹  Katrin Elisabeth Giel¹ 

[1] Department of Psychosomatic Medicine and Psychotherapy, Medical University Hospital Tübingen, Osianderstr. 5, 72076, Tübingen, Germany;

关键词: Alliance;    Anorexia nervosa;    Chronic;    Eating disorder;    Inpatient;    Motivation;    Therapy;    Stages of change;    Transtheoretical model;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-244X-13-111

 received in 2012-12-12, accepted in 2013-03-27,  发布年份 2013

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundAnorexia nervosa (AN) is associated with high rates of chronicity and relapse risk is a considerable therapeutic challenge in the disorder. The aim of the present study was to investigate the association of stages of change and outcome with a focus on the relapse struggle in the maintenance stage in patients with predominantly chronic AN. Further, therapeutic alliance and stages of change associations were explored.MethodsAs an instrument measuring relapse struggle in the maintenance stage, we applied the short form of the University of Rhode Island Change Assessment-Short (URICA-S). We assessed stages of change in 39 patients with a predominantly chronic course of AN in early, middle, and late stages of inpatient psychotherapy. General symptom severity as assessed by the SCL-90-R and weight change were investigated as outcome measures.ResultsIn-line with earlier evidence, contemplation significantly predicted therapeutic alliance. Further, we demonstrated that relapse risk as operationalized by URICA-S maintenance is an important predictor of general psychopathology. BMI change was not predicted by stages of change.ConclusionsThe URICA-S maintenance scale might be applied to help identify patients at relapse risk. High URICA-S maintenance scores could be considered as one critical aspect of AN patients who might especially benefit from relapse-preventing aftercare programs.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Mander et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2013. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.