They met in small groups of five to six people and one leader and the CBT consisted of relaxation training, cognitive restructuring, and worry exposure. Participants were taught the nature of anxiety and its purpose, how to monitor anxiety symptoms and situations, progressive, passive, applied, and cue-controlled muscle relaxation, risk estimation and decatastrophizing, imaginal and in vivo systematic desensitization, and worry behavior prevention. The adults were asked to do around thirty minutes on homework a day. They found that overall, some adults dropped out of the classes for varying reasons. In addition, they found that after twelve weeks, twenty-two percent of CBT participants still met GAD diagnostic criteria. CBT they discovered was clearly superior to the other forms of treatment discussed in the article. They found that CBT helped a good deal of the adults tested in the experiment and that some could even function on a normal level after the sessions. However, there are weaknesses to their study. Their population was small and somewhat homogenous with it being mainly white, female, well-educated, and active thus not including many other groups of people in the category. In addition, the ability to detect differences in improvement after CBT compared to other treatments was somewhat limited because of the small sample of people and the small effect sizes. The greatest strength of the study is that it was the first psychotherapy outcome study to date to randomize older adults with a diagnosed anxiety disorder to alternative interventions or to a waiting period to control for spontaneous recovery. In addition, although one of the study's weaknesses was its small sample, it was also a strength because the participants were medically ill and taking psychotropic medications made it somewhat more representative of older GAD patients. .
After reading this article, I find that I better understand the treatment of people with GAD and what they suffer from in having GAD.