Rationale for the CAMS Treatments
At the time CAMS was initiated, cognitive-behavior
therapy [18-20] and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors
[21-24] had emerged as the most effective treatments
for pediatric anxiety disorders [25]. Despite
positive outcomes in previous RCTs,[12] response rates
were short of exemplary, with approximately 40-50% of
treated youth remaining symptomatic at the end of
acute treatment. Moreover, with the exception of one
small study[26] that compared CBT alone to medication
alone in youth with SoP, clinical trialists had not yet
compared the relative efficacy of psychosocial and psychopharmacological
interventions in the same study
population. This had raised speculation that CBT trials
(often based in university psychology clinics) and medication
trials (often based in medical centers) were conducted
with different populations of anxious youth.
With respect to combination trials for childhood anxiety
disorders, only one study, conducted in a pediatric
obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) population,[27]
compared and demonstrated the superiority of combination
treatment (CBT+SSRI) to CBT and SSRIs alone.
Therefore, CAMS provided an important and necessary
extension to the empirical literature by comparing CBT
alone, an SSRI alone, and their combination to pill placebo
in the same clinical population recruited across
both medical center and psychology clinic sites.
Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy Studies
Cognitive behavioral therapy for child and adolescent
anxiety disorders assumes that pathological anxiety is
the result of an interaction between somatic or physiological
arousal, cognitive distortions, and avoidance behavior.
Accordingly, CBT [28] addresses each domain
through: (1) corrective psychoeducation about anxiety
and feared situations; (2) developmentally appropriate
cognitive restructuring skills to address maladaptive
thinking and to learn coping-focused thinking; (3)
somatic management techniques to target autonomic
arousal and related physiological reactivity; (4) graduated,
systematic, and controlled exposure tasks to feared
situations/stimuli to eliminate avoidance behavior; and
(5) relapse prevention to consolidate and maintain treatment
gain