Early prevention in childhood anxiety disorders.

摘要

Prevention represents the Holy Grail for mental disorders, as in other areas of medicine. However, prevention trials are notoriously difficult to design and conduct because of the long time frames involved and the difficulty of reliably identifying malleable risk factors. This is particularly true for studies of young children, in which rapidly changing developmental status, marked heterogeneity of environmental factors, and difficulty in identifying intervention targets all confound study designs. In this issue, Rapee et al. (1) report the extended follow-up of a selective intervention that yielded promising initial results (2). The study is notable for the early age at which children were selected (a mean age of less than 4 years), the brief nature of the intervention, and the sustained positive outcome over a 3-year follow-up period.