Smartphone-Based Acceptance and Commitment Therapy Aids Fibromyalgia

FRIDAY, Aug. 2, 2024 (HealthDay News) — Digital acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) is safe and efficacious compared with daily digital symptom tracking for managing fibromyalgia, according to a study published online July 8 in The Lancet.

R. Michael Gendreau, M.D., Ph.D., from Gendreau Consulting in Poway, California, and colleagues randomly assigned 275 adult participants (aged 22 to 75 years) with fibromyalgia to either the digital ACT group (12-week, self-guided, smartphone-delivered digital ACT program) or an active control group that offered daily symptom tracking and monitoring and access to health-related and fibromyalgia-related educational materials.

The researchers found that at 12 weeks, 71 percent of ACT participants reported improvement on the patient global impression of change versus 22 percent of the active control participants. There were no reports of device-related safety events.

“Fibromyalgia options are typically limited to a handful of pharmacological interventions that have limited efficacy and that can come with difficult-to-manage side effects,” coauthor Mike Rosenbluth, Ph.D., CEO of Swing Therapeutics, said in a statement. “This publication validates Stanza as a guideline-directed nondrug approach that many patients previously couldn’t access due to few available trained clinicians, geographic limitations, and cost.”

Swing Therapeutics funded the study.

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