Brief interventions to reduce benzodiazepine use

Motivational interviewing was found to have no different effect than treatment as usual in a systematic review  (Darker et al., 2015) in:

• reducing use at any time intervals;
• reducing drop-outs at any time intervals

A more recent systematic review with meta-analysis (Lynch at al., 2021,, studies = 8, n= 2071) investigated at the effectiveness of brief interventions in primary care compared to usual care. Results found promising yet very low quality (and thus not conclusive) evidence on:

• discontinuation of BZRA use at 6 months (eight studies, RR = 2.73, 95% CI = 1.84-4.06) and 12 months post-intervention (two studies, RR = 3.41, 95% CI = 2.22-5.25)