Clinical effectiveness of cognitive behavioural therapy on alcohol-dependent patients: an observation with the WeChat platform

Abstract

BackgroundWith the continuous improvement of people’s material living standards, the consumption of alcoholic beverages is increasing. Alcohol dependence caused by alcohol addiction has become a widespread concern in society. As the brand-new medical and health model created by the modern biomedical technology revolution and the information technology revolution, mobile health has been used more and more widely in the field of medical health with the characteristics of convenience, rapidity and generalisability. With the general use of the social software WeChat, it is feasible to implement mobile health on the WeChat platform.AimWe aimed to explore the clinical effect of WeChat platform used in the cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) on the maintenance period of alcohol dependence and addiction.MethodsSeventy alcohol-dependent patients in the withdrawal maintenance stage admitted into our hospital were randomly divided into the CBT on WeChat platform group (the experiment group, n=35) and the general clinical treatment using sertraline group (the control group, n=35) with block randomisation grouping. They were evaluated with the Severity of Alcohol Dependence Questionnaire (SADQ-C) before the treatment, at the end of the fourth week, at the end of the eighth week and at the end of the twelfth week of treatment. In addition, Zung’s Self-Rating Anxiety Scale (SAS) and Self-Rating Depression Scale (SDS) were employed to evaluate the degree of anxiety and depression of the two groups.ResultsThe SADQ-C, SAS and SDS scores of the two groups after treatment decreased markedly compared with those before treatments, and the differences were statistically significant. Between-group comparison: the SADQ-C scores of the experiment group at the end of the fourth, eighth and twelfth weeks were lower than those of the control group, and the difference was statistically significant, which indicated that the score reduction in the experiment group was larger than that in the control group. The SAS and SDS scores of the experiment group at these time points were not significantly different from those of the control group, which indicated that these two treatment methods were comparable in treating patients’ anxiety and depression.ConclusionThe CBT intervention using WeChat may improve the subjectively reported severity of alcohol dependence of patients who had completed detoxification. It is conducive to prevention of relapse, and is convenient for patients. It is worthy of clinical application and further study.

<p>Cognitive Impairments in Early-Detoxified Alcohol-Dependent Inpatients and Their Associations with Socio-Demographic, Clinical and Psychological Factors: An Exploratory Study</p>

“…8 For example, it is well known that cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is an effective treatment, but only a few studies have paid attention to patients' neuropsychological functioning; this approach could be inappropriate or insufficient for patients with cognitive impairments since it requires preserved cognitive capacities such as episodic and procedural memories and executive functions. 8,44,45 Furthermore, cognitive impairment can also influence readiness to change, active participation in group therapy, treatment compliance and outcomes. 9 Unfortunately, cognitive assessment is often missed in AUD treatment since neuropsychological test batteries are costly and time-consuming.…”

Telehealth interventions for substance use disorders in low- and- middle income countries: A scoping review

“…In this study, feasibility was defined in broad terms and included variables such as: ease of recruitment of participants, number of participants recruited in relation to targeted sample size, cost effectiveness, ease of delivery of the telehealth intervention, retention in the program follow up, and acceptability (perceived usefulness of the intervention, ratio of participants who dropped out/ requested to be removed from program, likability of the intervention and willingness to recommend intervention to others) [42][43][44][45][46]. For this review, articles that assessed 'Effectiveness' were those that described change in substance use following the intervention.…”

“…For this review, articles that assessed 'Effectiveness' were those that described change in substance use following the intervention. Change in substance use was assessed through self-report, use of standardized tools or criteria and biochemical tests [44][45][46].…”

“…Participants cut across individuals in the community who were dependent on psychoactive substances and indicated a willingness to quit, oil workers, night club patrons, families, and children and adolescents. Consequently, settings spanned across workplace [75], general population [16,45,46,49,52,[56][57][58][59]66,81,82], health treatment facilities [44,50,51,53,54,60,65,[67][68][69][70][71]76,77,79,80], night clubs [13,64], and schools [55,61,63,[72][73][74]78].…”

“…Studies which assessed cigarette smoking across various populations dominated our review with 25 articles [16,45,46,[49][50][51][52]54,55,[57][58][59]61,63,65,[68][69][70][71]74,75,78,79,81,82], followed by alcohol use in eight articles [13,44,56,64,72,73,76,80]. One study assessed only methamphetamine [62], one assessed any psychoactive substance use [66], and one study assessed both cigarette smoking and alcohol [77].…”