Does adding pharmaceutical medication contribute to empirically supported psychological treatment for anxiety disorders?

BACKGROUND The goal of this work is to determine whether the combined use of empirically supported psychological treatments (ESTs) and pharmacological therapy (PT) achieves better results than the isolated use of ESTs in the treatment of Anxiety Disorders (AD) in a welfare clinical setting. METHOD A quasi-experimental study was designed, with a sample of 287 patients with primary diagnosis of AD. Of the patients, 25.1% (n = 72) received ESTs+PT and 74.9% (n = 216), only ESTs. At pretreatment, no intergroup differences were observed in anxiety and depressive symptoms, duration of the problem and comorbidity, but there were differences for previous treatments (they were fewer in the EST group). RESULTS After the intervention, both groups showed similar degree of completion, compliance with treatment, task performance and similar effectiveness at post treatment but EST+PT was significantly longer (16.58 sessions vs. 13.04 sessions). CONCLUSIONS It is concluded that adding PT to EST does not improve the results but it does increase the cost and duration of treatment, thereby reducing the efficiency of the intervention.