By Julie Steenhuysen
CHICAGO, April 7 (Reuters) - Adding talk therapy to typical anxiety treatments that often include drugs helped older adults cope better, improving their quality of life and lowering their risk for depression and other health problems, U.S. researchers said on Tuesday.
An increasingly popular type of therapy called cognitive behavior therapy, or CBT, which includes specific problem-solving strategies, significantly improved levels of worry, depression and general mental health compared with those who got usual care such as anti-depressants and anti-anxiety drugs, they said.
"This study is the first to suggest that CBT can be useful for managing worry and associated symptoms among older patients in primary care," Melinda Stanley of the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, whose study appears in the Journal of the American Medical Association, said in a statement.
The findings follow similar results in younger adults, and suggest a new approach to treating anxiety in older adults.
About 11 percent of older adults see their primary care doctor for treatment of anxiety, which typically includes a variety of medications. But anti-anxiety drugs such benzodiazepines, a type of tranquilizer, can worsen other problems common to older adults such as falls, hip fractures and memory problems.
"Often older adults don't want to add another medication. They are worried about the side effects, the interactions with other medicines," Stanley said in a telephone interview.
She and colleagues wanted to see if cognitive behavior therapy might help.
They studied 134 older adults with an average age of 67 who visited their primary care doctor for anxiety symptoms.
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