You.Mind! | Boosting First-line Mental Health Care for Youngsters Suffering From Chronic Conditions With Mindfulness

Catholic University (KU) of Leuven

Status: Completed

Conditions: Chronic Illness

Treatments: Behavioral: Mindfulness-Based Intervention

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT04359563

S63485

Details and patient eligibility

About

Adolescents with chronic conditions often experience high levels of stress, anxiety and depression and reduced quality of life. Mindfulness-Based Interventions (MBI) have been found to improve emotional distress in clinical and non-clinical populations. Recent reviews suggest that MBIs are a promising technique to support adolescents with a chronic condition in managing their symptoms and ultimately enhance their quality of life.

To test the effects of an MBI on emotional distress and quality of life and delineate the underlying mechanisms, the You.Mind! study uses a randomised staggered within-subjects design. 30 adolescents with a chronic condition (taking drop-out into account) will be randomised to a baseline phase of 14 to 28 days followed by an MBI, consisting of 4 online group sessions and online support spread over 8 weeks. Outcomes will be assessed by short, repeated measurements throughout the baseline, training, and follow-up phases and by standardized questionnaires and experience sampling measures before randomisation, at post-intervention and 3-months follow-up. Analysis will be based on general linear modelling and multilevel mixed-effects modelling. The investigators hypothesize that a MBI can help adolescents with a chronic condition to reduce their symptoms of stress, anxiety and depression, and increase their quality of life.

Full description

Once a pool of 15 participants has been enrolled, they will be randomised to one of three MBI groups, which start their training with half a week time lag. Within each group, participants will be randomised to a baseline phase of 2, 2.5, 3, 3.5 or 4 weeks, with 3-4 days between starting points of individual participants. Thus, the baseline phase will start at different time points for participants within the same group to enable them to start the intervention simultaneously while having baseline phases of varying length. Participants from different groups may begin their baseline phase at the same time while their intervention starts at a different time point. The same procedure will be repeated for the second pool of 15 participants.

Enrollment: 22 patients

Sex: All

Ages: 14 to 19 years old

Volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• The adolescents suffer from a chronic condition lasting one year or more that impairs functional mobility and/or requires ongoing medical care.
• They should understand and speak Dutch.
• Written informed consent (including informed consent from a parent for those <18yrs) after having been informed on all aspects of the study.

Exclusion criteria

• Evidence of a current or lifetime severe mental illness.
• Current treatment for a psychiatric disorder.

Trial design

Primary purpose: Supportive Care

Allocation: N/A

Interventional model: Single Group Assignment

Masking: None (Open label)

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22 participants in 1 patient group

Mindfulness-Based Intervention

Experimental group

Description:

The MBI programme adheres to a standardized protocol developed from MBSR (Kabat-Zinn, 1990) and MBCT (Segal et al., 2012) manuals and is adjusted to an adolescent population. Adjustments are based on the investigator's ample experience with mindfulness and adolescents in different contexts. Key objectives are: (1) to increase awareness of one's present moment experience; (2) to teach an attitude of openness and acceptance (non-judging) toward one's experience. This accepting attitude changes the person's relationship with the experience, being a detached and non-reactive orientation. Participants learn to recognize entanglement with one's thoughts and emotions and there is an increased understanding of one's spontaneous reactions. If adolescents adopt these skills, their negative emotions and cognitions will no longer be reinforced, creating the opportunity to deal with problematic thoughts and feelings.

Treatment:

Behavioral: Mindfulness-Based Intervention