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Category: Project

Description: Background: Cognitive Behavior Therapies (CBT) have shown to be highly effective for treating youth anxiety, yet there has been ongoing debate as to whether involving parents improves outcomes. As evidence has accumulated, reviews and meta-analyses have attempted to answer this question. Each review often has high impact in the field, however, they typically use varied methodologies and draw on different primary studies. Different formats of CBT for youth anxiety have developed in relation to parent involvement, including youth only CBT (Y-CBT; youth alone attends treatment), youth and parent/family CBT (F-CBT; youth and parent attend) and most recently, parent only CBT (P-CBT; parent alone attends). This is a protocol describing an overview of systematic reviews comparing the relative efficacy of different formats of CBT for youth anxiety over the period this topic was studied. Methods: A systematic review of medical and psychological databases (PsycINFO, PubMed, SCOPUS, Web of Science, Cochrane Library and EMBASE) will identify systematic reviews comparing the efficacy of different formats of parent involvement in CBT for youth anxiety. It will also describe the different types of analyses conducted in each review. The review will summarize the relative efficacy of formats in a table and then describe results in a narrative synthesis. An AMSTAR 2 quality rating will be given to each included review. Discussion: This overview will explore and compare the relative efficacy of Y-CBT, P-CBT and F-CBT for youth anxiety over time. It will provide recommendations for conducting and reporting systematic reviews regarding parental involvement for youth anxiety.