This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Reply to article  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Related article  • Similar articles in this journal  Topic Collections  • Cognitive Therapy  • Eating Disorders  • Alert me on articles by topic

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

In reply

We welcome the opportunity to clarify the interpretation of our study of CBT for bulimia nervosa. This study was designed to identify those patients who responded especially well to CBT (complete abstinence from bingeing and purging) but who might benefit from additional follow-up support to consolidate their improvement. To do this, we employed a highly sensitive definition of "relapse" to mean no episode of bingeing or purging whatsoever in the month prior to the 17-week or 4-month posttreatment interview.

As Fairburn and Cooper point out, however, our article could be misinterpreted as a study of clinical relapse, thereby casting doubt on the value of CBT. This is not the case, and the following data should make this clear:

• In our study, we focused only on the 48 patients who had a complete response to CBT within the 20 weeks of treatment (ie, they were totally free from bingeing . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Stewart Agras, MD
Stanford, Calif

Jim Mitchell, MD
Grand Forks, ND

Terry Wilson, PhD
Piscataway, NJ

Scott Crow, MD
Minneapolis, Minn

RELATED ARTICLE

Relapse in Bulimia Nervosa
Christopher G. Fairburn and Zafra Cooper
Arch Gen Psychiatry. 2003;60(8):850.
EXTRACT | FULL TEXT