Adjunctive formal psychotherapy to contingency management (CM) to improve outcomes

Adding another formal psychotherapy, such as cognitive– behavioural therapy (CBT) or motivational enhancement therapy (MET), to contingency management (CM) was found in a systematic review with meta-analysis (Sheridan et al., 2020, 12 studies, N = 1654) to have no effect in:

• improving both treatment end and at post-treatment follow-up compared with CM only
  • no evidence of a synergistic effect in PPA at treatment end (relative risk (RR) 0.97, 95% CI 0.85 to 1.09; p=0.57)
  • sensitivity analysis of studies featuring CBT/MET also found no evidence of an effect (RR 0.92; 95% CI 0.79 to 1.08; p=0.32)
  • none of the secondary outcomes showed any evidence of benefit.