Rachel D. Thompson

Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Children with Comorbid Physical Illness

In addition to the usual developmental challenges, children and adolescents with chronic physical illness face psychosocial challenges that affect their quality of life. This review describes different aspects of coping with chronic physical illness in childhood and the empirical evidence examining the usefulness of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) for the treatment of children and adolescents with chronic physical illnesses and related psychological comorbidities. Four diseases (diabetes, inflammatory bowel disease, cancer, and sickle cell disease) were chosen as model illnesses to demonstrate key CBT findings in more detail. Future research recommendations in this challenging population are also addressed.

Using the Children's Depression Inventory in youth with inflammatory bowel disease: support for a physical illness-related factor.

The objective of the present investigation was to evaluate the factor structure of the Childrens Depression Inventory (CDI) in adolescents with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) to better understand the CDIs psychometric properties in a medically complicated population. An exploratory factor analysis was performed on CDI data collected from a clinical sample of 191 youth with IBD, aged 11 to 17 years. Exploratory factor analysis with quartimax rotation yielded 3 factors: mood, behavioral/motivational, and somatic complaints. Only the somatic factor (ie, fatigue, sleep, decreased appetite, and worry about aches and pain) showed a significant positive correlation with IBD severity. The CDI holds promise as a brief measure for the assessment of depressive features psychometrically independent of IBD severity and common steroid treatments as well as of nongastrointestinal specific somatic complaints in a sample of adolescents with IBD. Continued work in this area of research appears promising in honing the assessment of depressive and somatic symptoms in youths with IBD.

Drinking refusal self-efficacy and tension-reduction alcohol expectancies moderating the relationship between generalized anxiety and drinking behaviors in young adult drinkers.

Despite the substantial comorbidity between generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) and alcohol use disorders (AUD), little is known about contributing factors to this relationship. This lack of knowledge has limited the development of theoretical models explicating the interesting yet complex relationship between GAD and AUD. The current study examined the roles of generalized anxiety, tension-reduction alcohol expectancies, and drinking refusal self-efficacy in accounting for the variance of alcohol consumption and alcohol-related consequences in a sample of young adult drinkers (N = 474; 18-25 years of age, median age 19, 66% female) from a large, urban Midwestern university. Results showed that generalized anxiety level interacted with both tension-reduction alcohol expectancies and drinking refusal self-efficacy to predict alcohol consumption and alcohol-related consequences. Findings support the assessment of both alcohol-related consequences and alcohol consumption, and highlight the importance of drinking refusal self-efficacy, which is a currently underexamined variable. Study results also enhance the knowledge about the underlining mechanisms of GAD and AUD comorbidity, which facilitates the development of an empirically based theoretical paradigm for their relationship.