BACKGROUND
BACKGROUND: Low adherence to recommended treatments is a multifactorial problem in rehabilitation for patients with myocardial infarction (MI). In a nationwide trial of internet-delivered cognitive behavior therapy (iCBT) for the high-risk subgroup of patients with MI also reporting symptoms of anxiety, depression, or both (MI-ANXDEP), adherence was low. Since low adherence to psychotherapy leads to a waste of therapeutic resources and risky treatment abortion in MI-ANXDEP patients, identifying early predictors for adherence is potentially valuable for effective targeted care.
OBJECTIVE
Applied predictive modelling with supervised machine learning to investigate both established and novel predictors for iCBT adherence in MI-ANXDEP patients.
METHODS
Data were from 90 MI-ANXDEP patients recruited from 25 hospitals in Sweden and randomized to treatment in the iCBT trial U-CARE Heart. Time-point of prediction was at completion of the first homework assignment. Adherence was defined as having completed at least the first two homework assignments within the 14-week treatment period. A supervised machine learning procedure was applied to identify the most potent predictors for adherence available at the first treatment session from a range of demographic, clinical, psychometric, and linguistic predictors. The internal binary classifier was a random forest model within a 3x10-fold cross-validated recursive feature elimination (RFE) resampling, which selected the final predictor subset which best differentiated adherers versus non-adherers.
RESULTS
RESULTS: Patient mean age was 58.4 (9.4) years, 62% (56/90) were men, and 48% (43/90) were adherent. Out of the 34 potential predictors for adherence, RFE selected an optimal subset of 56% (19/34) (Accuracy 0.64, 95% CI 0.61-0.68, P < 0.01). The strongest predictors for adherence were in order of importance (1) self-assessed cardiac-related fear, (2) sex, and (3) the number of words the patient used to answer the first homework assignment.
CONCLUSIONS
CONCLUSIONS: Adherence to iCBT for MI-ANXDEP patients was best predicted by cardiac-related fear and sex, consistent with previous research, but also by novel linguistic predictors from written patient behavior which conceivably indicate verbal ability or therapeutic alliance. Future research should investigate potential causal mechanisms, seek to determine what underlying constructs the linguistic predictors tap into, and whether these findings replicate for other interventions, outside of Sweden, in larger samples, and for patients with other conditions whom are offered iCBT.
CLINICALTRIAL
TRIAL REGISTRATION: ClinicalTrials.gov NCT01504191; https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT01504191 (Archived at Webcite at http://www.webcitation.org/6xWWSEQ22)