Effectiveness of Interventions for Cognitive Processing in Body Dysmorphic Disorder and Body Dissatisfaction: Systematic Review

Body Dysmorphic Disorder (BDD) is characterised by an appearance-related cognitive deficit based on distorted ideas and beliefs about one’s own body. These lead to high body dissatisfaction (BD), which affects attention, cognitive processing and behaviour.

The aim of this review was to systematically examine the evidence for the effectiveness of psychological interventions to improve cognitive impairments in BDD and high BD.

The systematic review report followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and MetaAnalyses (PRISMA) statement. The databases Pubmed, WOS, Scopus and EBSCO were searched, yielding a total of 2,153 records. After applying the inclusion and exclusion criteria, 10 articles, published until September 2023, were selected. Eligible studies were assessed for potential risk of bias using the Cochrane risk of bias assessment Review Manager (RevMan) tool for the Randomized Controlled Trials and ROBINS-I tool for non-randomized studies.

The results suggest that psychological interventions can reduce cognitive deficits in BDD. However, the results are supported by a limited number of very diverse studies, conducted with non-clinical, small samples, few sessions and an overall moderate risk of bias.

Further research is needed to confirm the efficacy of psychological interventions on cognitive deficits in BDD.