Article Text
PDF
Abstract
Introduction Mental disorders are characterised by a high likelihood of symptom recurrence or chronicity. Thus, in the vulnerable post-discharge phase, aftercare and follow-up aim at stabilising treatment effects, promoting functionality and preventing relapse or readmission. Internet- and mobile-based interventions may represent low threshold and effective extensions to aftercare in tertiary prevention of mental disorders.
Objectives The planned systematic review and meta-analysis aims to synthesise and analyse existing evidence on the effectiveness of psychological internet- and mobile-based aftercare or follow-up in maintaining treatment effects and/or preventing recurrence in adults with mental disorders.
Methods and analysis Electronic databases (PsycInfo, MEDLINE and Cochrane Central Register of Controlled trials) will be searched systematically, complemented by a hand-search of ongoing trials and reference lists of selected studies. Data extraction and evaluation will be conducted by two independent researchersand quality will be assessed with the Cochrane risk of bias tool. Eligibility criteria for selecting studies will be: randomised controlled trials of internet-based and mobile-based, psychological aftercare and follow-up for the tertiary prevention of mental disorders in an adult population. Primary outcome will be symptom severity. Secondary outcomes will be symptom or disorder recurrence rate, rehospitalisation rate, functionality, quality of life or adherence to primary treatment. Further data items to be extracted will be: study design, intervention and technical characteristics, type of mental disorder or clinical symptom to be treated, target population items, setting, treatment engagement and assessment of additional outcome variables. Meta-analytic pooling will be conducted when data of included studies are comparable in terms of study design, intervention type, endpoints, assessments and target mental disorder. Cumulative evidence will be evaluated according to the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation framework.
Ethics and dissemination Ethics approval is not required. Results from this review will be published in peer-reviewed journals and presented at international conferences.
Trial registration number PROSPERO CRD42017055289.
- Systematic Review
- Meta-analysis
- Internet- And Mobile-based
- Tertiary Prevention
- Aftercare
- Mental Disorders
This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Statistics from Altmetric.com
Footnotes
Contributors All authors were involved in the concept and review design of the study and data analysis plan; contributed to the further writing and approved the final version of the manuscript. SH and SF wrote the draft of this manuscript. LS provided valuable revisions.
Funding This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-forprofit sectors.
Competing interests None declared.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
Correction notice This paper has been amended since it was published Online First. Owing to a scripting error, some of the publisher names in the references were replaced with 'BMJ Publishing Group'. This only affected the full text version, not the PDF. We have since corrected these errors and the correct publishers have been inserted into the references.