Episodic future thinking in type 2 diabetes: Further development and validation of the Health Information Thinking control for clinical trials.

Episodic Future Thinking (EFT) reduces delay discounting and may have the potential as a clinical tool to increase the likelihood of health-promoting behaviors. However, evaluations of EFT in clinical settings require control conditions that match the effort and frequency of cue generation, as well as participants' expectations of improvement. The Health Information Thinking (HIT) control addresses these issues, but how this control affects delay discounting in individuals with diabetes and obesity when utilizing diabetes-management specific health-information vignettes is unknown. Moreover, little research has explored whether EFT reduces delay discounting in individuals with type 2 diabetes. To this end, we examined the impact of EFT, HIT, and a secondary no-cue control condition (NCC; assessments as usual) on delay discounting in 434 adults with self-reported type 2 diabetes and obesity recruited using Amazon Mechanical Turk. After completing an initial screening questionnaire, eligible participants reported demographics, then were randomized to EFT, HIT, or NCC conditions. Following the generation of seven EFT or HIT cues, participants assigned to EFT or HIT conditions completed a delay discounting task while imagining EFT or HIT cues; no-cue participants completed the task without cues. EFT participants demonstrated significantly lower delay discounting levels than HIT or NCC participants; no differences in delay discounting between HIT and NCC participants were observed. These results suggest that engaging in EFT, but not diabetes-specific HIT, results in lower delay discounting in adults with type 2 diabetes and obesity. This provides further evidence for the appropriateness of the HIT control for clinical trials examining the effect of EFT on delay discounting in adults with self-reported type 2 diabetes.

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Copyright: © 2023 Brown et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Déclaration de conflit d'intérêts

Brown: None. Bickel: Although the following activities/relationships do not create a conflict of interest pertaining to this article, in the interest of full disclosure, Warren K. Bickel would like to report the following: Warren K. Bickel is a principal of HealthSim, LLC; BEAM Diagnostics, Inc.; and Red 5 Group, LLC. In addition, he serves on the scientific advisory board for Sober Grid, Inc.; and Ria Health; serves as a consultant for Boehringer Ingelheim International; and works on a project supported by Indivior, Inc. Epstein: None. Stein: None. This does not alter our adherence to PLOS ONE policies on sharing data and materials.