ArticleChild psychiatry and human development2022
Are We Comparing Apples with Oranges? Assessing Improvement Across Symptoms, Functioning, and Goal Progress for Adolescent Anxiety and Depression.
Article in Child psychiatry and human development, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 10 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- Trial
- Value-based care for behavioral health: A more measured approach to achieve true value.Npj mental health research · 2026Review
- Latent profile analysis of psychiatric symptoms and the Ability to Participate in Social Roles and Activities.BMC psychology · 2025Article
- Goal-oriented practices in youth mental health and wellbeing settings: A scoping review and thematic analysis of empirical evidence.Psychology and psychotherapy · 2025Article
- Self-Set Goals: Autistic Adults Facilitating Their Self-Determination Through Digitally Mediated Social Stories.Autism in adulthood · 2025Article
- Goals Form: Reliability, validity, and clinical utility of an idiographic goal-focused measure for routine outcome monitoring in psychotherapy.Journal of clinical psychology · 2023Article
- Feasibility and Acceptability of a Remote Stepped Care Mental Health Programme for Adolescents during the COVID-19 Pandemic in India.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2023Article
- Working with Goals and Trauma in Youth Mental Health.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Article
- Clinical, Brain, and Multilevel Clustering in Early Psychosis and Affective Stages.JAMA psychiatry · 2022Article
- Monitoring and Measurement in Child and Adolescent Mental Health: It's about More than Just Symptoms.International journal of environmental research and public health · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Strategies for comparing routinely collected outcome data across services or systems include focusing on a common indicator (e.g., symptom change) or aggregating results from different measures or outcomes into a comparable core metric. The implications of either approach for judging treatment success are not fully understood. This study drew on naturalistic outcome data from 1641 adolescents with moderate or severe anxiety and/or depression symptoms who received routine specialist care across 60 mental health services in England. The study compared rates of meaningful improvement between the domains of internalizing symptoms, functioning, and progress towards self-defined goals. Consistent cross-domain improvement was observed in only 15.6% of cases. Close to one in four (24.0%) young people with reliably improved symptoms reported no reliable improvement in functioning. Inversely, one in three (34.8%) young people reported meaningful goal progress but no reliable symptom improvement. Monitoring systems that focus exclusively on symptom change risk over- or under-estimating actual impact, while aggregating different outcomes into a single metric can mask informative differences in the number and type of outcomes showing improvement. A move towards harmonized outcome measurement approaches across multiple domains is needed to ensure fair and meaningful comparisons.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.