Editorial: The Durable Long-Term Benefits of Evidence-Based Care for Children and Adolescents With Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.

Pediatric obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) can be enormously taxing for affected youth and their families; the distress, impairment, and family upheaval that it brings are well documented.1 Both exposure-based cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) and pharmacological interventions are efficacious for reducing symptoms and functional impairment, producing mean effect sizes of g = 1.21 and g = 0.50 respectively.2 These treatments-whether administered alone or in combination-form the backbone of our current suite of interventions. They have helped countless young people to restore functioning and lead healthy, productive lives. Despite this encouraging picture, long-term outcomes for children and adolescents with OCD remain poorly understood. Even for youth who receive high-quality evidence-based care, it is unclear what to expect down the road, and this gap in understanding creates challenges for clinical decision making as well as angst for parents who, quite understandably, want to know what the future holds for their children. Although CBT often is recommended as the frontline intervention for pediatric OCD3 and parents routinely report preferring to begin with nonmedication options,4 data to help patients and families make fully informed treatment decisions are scarce. Most would like to know the long-term outcomes associated with various treatment options, and this is a challenge given that the typical length of follow-up in CBT trials for pediatric OCD is 3 to 6 months-well short of a typical school year. The study by Ivarsson et al.5 is therefore a much-needed advance for the field, offering a first view of long-term outcomes for youth with OCD treated with evidence-based treatments.