Does seeing clients more often help them finish PTSD treatment?

A meta-regression across 84 study arms asked whether session frequency drives treatment completion.

A practical question for anyone delivering trauma therapy: does seeing clients more often help them actually finish treatment? This meta-regression pulled together data from a large PTSD clinical-trials repository, 84 study arms across 66 studies, to look at how session frequency and therapy type relate to completion. It focused on three gold-standard treatments: cognitive processing therapy (CPT), prolonged exposure (PE), and eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR). A few patterns emerged. Compared with CPT, patients were somewhat less likely to complete PE overall, but when PE was delivered more frequently than weekly, the odds of completing it doubled. Patients were also more than twice as likely to complete EMDR than CPT, though for EMDR the frequency effect wasn’t statistically clear. The researchers also flagged a messy problem in the field: only about a third of trials even defined what “completing treatment” means, making comparisons harder than they should be. The clinical upshot is that scheduling isn’t just logistics, for exposure-based therapy in particular, tighter session spacing may help more people cross the finish line. And the research world could help itself by agreeing on what completion actually means.