• Courtney P Keeton, Golda S Ginsburg, Kelly L Drake, Dara Sakolsky, Philip C Kendall, Boris Birmaher, Anne Marie Albano, John S March, Moira Rynn, John Piacentini, and John T Walkup.
• Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, 550 N. Broadway, Baltimore, MD 21205, USA. ckeeton@jhmi.edu
• Depress Anxiety. 2013 Sep 1; 30 (9): 865-72.

BackgroundTo examine (1) changes in parent (global psychological distress, trait anxiety) and family (dysfunction, burden) functioning following 12 weeks of child-focused anxiety treatment, and (2) whether changes in these parent and family factors were associated with child's treatment condition and response.MethodsParticipants were 488 youth ages 7-17 years (50% female; mean age 10.7 years) who met DSM-IV-TR criteria for social phobia, separation anxiety, and/or generalized anxiety disorder, and their parents. Youth were randomly assigned to 12 weeks of "Coping Cat" individual cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), medication management with sertraline (SRT), their combination (COMB), or medication management with pill placebo (PBO) within the multisite Child/Adolescent Anxiety Multimodal Study (CAMS). At pre- and posttreatment, parents completed measures of trait anxiety, psychological distress, family functioning, and burden of child illness; children completed a measure of family functioning. Blinded independent evaluators rated child's response to treatment using the Clinical Global Impression-Improvement Scale at posttreatment.ResultsAnalyses of covariance revealed that parental psychological distress and trait anxiety, and parent-reported family dysfunction improved only for parents of children who were rated as treatment responders, and these changes were unrelated to treatment condition. Family burden and child-reported family dysfunction improved significantly from pre- to posttreatment regardless of treatment condition or response.ConclusionsFindings suggest that child-focused anxiety treatments, regardless of intervention condition, can result in improvements in nontargeted parent symptoms and family functioning particularly when children respond successfully to the treatment.© 2013 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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