To design a treatment manual and adherence measure for attachment-based family therapy (ABFT) for adolescent depression and to collect pilot data on the treatment's efficacy.
Over a period of 2 years, 32 adolescents meeting criteria for major depressive disorder (MDD) were randomly assigned to 12 weeks of ABFT or a 6-week, minimal-contact, waitlist control group. The sample was 78% female and 69% African American; 69% were from low-income, inner-city communities.
At post-treatment, 81% of the patients treated with ABFT no longer met criteria for MDD, in contrast with 47% of patients in the waitlist group. Mixed factorial analyses of variance revealed that, compared with the waitlist group, patients treated with ABFT showed a significantly greater reduction in both depressive and anxiety symptoms and family conflict. Of the 15 treated cases assessed at the follow-up, 13 patients (87%) continued to not meet criteria for MDD 6 months after treatment ended.
ABFT appears to be a promising treatment and worthy of further development.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 15. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 03 October 2026.
All research outputs
#2,847,333
of 32,332,113 outputs
Outputs from Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
#1,022
of 4,999 outputs
Outputs of similar age
#3,707
of 67,276 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry
#4
of 25 outputs
Altmetric has tracked 32,332,113 research outputs across all sources so far. Compared to these this one has done particularly well and is in the 90th percentile: it's in the top 10% of all research outputs ever tracked by Altmetric.
So far Altmetric has tracked 4,999 research outputs from this source. They typically receive a lot more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 21.4. This one has done well, scoring higher than 78% of its peers.
Older research outputs will score higher simply because they've had more time to accumulate mentions. To account for age we can compare this Altmetric Attention Score to the 67,276 tracked outputs that were published within six weeks on either side of this one in any source. This one has done particularly well, scoring higher than 93% of its contemporaries.
We're also able to compare this research output to 25 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has done well, scoring higher than 84% of its contemporaries.
