SEPTEMBER 3, 2024
Data published in The Lancet indicate that Stanza (Swing Therapeutics), a self-guided, smartphone-based digital therapy, provides effective cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) without a clinician, suggesting a possible workaround to barriers caused by clinician shortages.
Guidelines for treating fibromyalgia recommend combining medication with nondrug approaches, including CBT. However, due to lack of trained providers and high cost, only 5% of fibromyalgia patients receive
Data published in The Lancet indicate that Stanza (Swing Therapeutics), a self-guided, smartphone-based digital therapy, provides effective cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) without a clinician, suggesting a possible workaround to barriers caused by clinician shortages.
Guidelines for treating fibromyalgia recommend combining medication with nondrug approaches, including CBT. However, due to lack of trained providers and high cost, only 5% of fibromyalgia patients receive CBT.
“Stanza led to a significant reduction of fibromyalgia severity, measured by the Revised Fibromyalgia Impact Questionnaire, as well as a significant reduction in fibromyalgia symptoms including pain intensity, pain interference, fatigue, sleep disturbance, depression and physical function,” Mike Rosenbluth, PhD, the founder and CEO of Swing Therapeutics, in San Francisco, told Pain Medicine News.
The multicenter, randomized controlled trial included 275 participants who received either Stanza (which administered a type of CBT known as acceptance and commitment therapy) or an active control that offered daily symptom tracking, monitoring and access to health-related educational materials (Lancet 2024;404[10450]:364-374).
After 12 weeks, 71% of participants in the Stanza arm reported an improvement in well-being (measured by Patient Global Impression of Change), compared with 22% in the active control arm. There were no treatment-related adverse events observed in either group.
The findings from the study were robust enough that they served as the basis for FDA clearance of Stanza as a prescription digital therapy, but real-world outcomes and evidence of the long-term durability of Stanza were not addressed in the study.
However, real-world data from Swing Care—a digital platform that incorporates CBT for fibromyalgia—presented at this year’s Society of Behavioral Medicine meeting, demonstrated meaningful improvement in patients who receive multimodal care for fibromyalgia, including those who used Stanza. Among Swing Care users, 81% reported improvement in well-being at 90 days.
Furthermore, Rosenbluth noted that results from an extension of a prospective single-arm clinical trial (REACT-FM), presented at the U.S. Association for the Study of Pain annual meeting in 2023, found durable clinical effectiveness of Stanza treatment, “evidenced by the maintenance of the immediate treatment effect at month 3 through to month 12.”
—Myles Starr
