Digitally Enhanced Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Adolescents With Depression and Obesity

Adolescent depression is a major public health problem that has serious consequences for cardiometabolic disease, predicting heightened risk for glucose dysregulation, type 2 diabetes onset, and cardiovascular events. Evidence-based interventions such as cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) to decrease depression in adolescents with elevated body mass index (BMI ≥85th percentile for age and sex) are anticipated to improve cardiometabolic health, in part by ameliorating the negative impacts of depression on health behavior (e.g., physical activity, eating, and sleep). Our preliminary studies provide support for this overarching hypothesis. However, effect sizes for CBT were small-to-moderate, possibly due to less-than-optimal home practice in between sessions. Homework completion tracks with treatment effects in our team's and others' studies, likely because homework facilitates skills acquisition in daily life. Our overarching study rationale is that enhancement of CBT-group with a digital app is likely to strengthen homework completion and translation of CBT skills to healthier coping and behavior, leading to stronger improvements in cardiometabolic health than CBT-group alone. We will leverage mobile health (mHealth) to adapt a CBT-digital app for the distinct needs and preferences of adolescents with depression and elevated BMI. After we optimize the app's integration with CBT-group virtual sessions through focus groups and iterative pilot testing with adolescents, we will conduct a two-arm, single-site pilot and feasibility randomized controlled trial to compare a digitally-enhanced CBT-group (CBT+) with a virtual CBT-group only in 60 adolescents with depression and overweight/obesity to assess feasibility, acceptability, proof-of-concept, and implementation outcomes.