Every published study of Accelerated Resolution Therapy, summarized

As of September 2026, two randomized controlled trials of Accelerated Resolution Therapy (ART) have published results: a 57-person trial in US service members and veterans (2013) and a 54-person trial in older adults grieving a family member (2020). Everything else is open trials without a comparison group, case reports, reviews and commentaries. Nearly all of it comes from researchers connected to ART’s developer or to the research program at the University of South Florida (USF). The only systematic review, published in 2024, concluded that ART “shows some promise” but that “more high-quality studies are needed.”

This page lists every study we could find, grouped by type, with what each one found and what it cannot tell you. It is meant to be read alongside what the treatment guidelines say about ART and the plain-English walk-through of the 2013 randomized trial.

How to read this evidence

Not all studies carry the same weight. A few questions sort them quickly.

Randomized controlled trial (RCT)

People are assigned by chance to ART or to a comparison condition. This is the strongest design for asking whether a treatment caused an improvement, because the groups start out alike.

What the comparison was

Beating a wait-list (no treatment yet) is a lower bar than beating an “attention control” (time with a professional but no therapy), which is a lower bar again than beating another proven therapy. No published trial has compared ART with a first-line trauma therapy.

Open (uncontrolled) trial or cohort

Everyone gets ART and symptoms are measured before and after. Improvement is real information, but without a comparison group it cannot be separated from time, attention, or people starting treatment when they feel worst.

Case report or case series

A description of one or a handful of people. Useful for ideas, not conclusions.

Self-report vs clinician-rated

Almost every ART study measured PTSD with a questionnaire the participant fills in (the PCL). Major guidelines give more weight to a structured interview by a trained assessor. This gap is the stated reason the VA/DoD guideline could not recommend for or against ART.

Completers vs everyone who started

Results counted only among people who finished treatment look better than results counted across everyone who began. Many ART figures are completer-only.

Developer connection

ART was developed in 2008 by Laney Rosenzweig, MS, LMFT, who co-authored many of the studies. Other authors have disclosed training clinicians for, or advising, ART organizations. That does not make the findings wrong. It does mean independent replication is still missing.

Small samples matter too. With 20 or 50 people, a single unusual result can move an average a long way, and rare side effects may simply not show up.

Randomized controlled trials

Only two randomized trials of ART have reported results, and both came from the developer-linked research network. Neither compared ART with another trauma therapy. Several secondary papers reuse data from these same two trials, so they add detail rather than new evidence.

Six further papers from the grief trial report quality of life, expectations, experiences of loss, and problems with collecting saliva cortisol samples. They add no new efficacy evidence beyond quality of life, and all come from the same research team:

• Mason et al. 2022, Journal of Palliative Medicine: quality of life, 27 participants.
• Mason et al. 2022, Journal of Gerontological Nursing: quality of life, mixed methods.
• Mason et al. 2022, Death Studies: quality-of-life themes.
• Buck et al. 2022, Health & Social Care in the Community: treatment expectancy, 29 participants.
• Buck et al. 2022, Western Journal of Nursing Research: loss within couples, 29 participants.
• Bell et al. 2021, Clinical Nursing Research: difficulties measuring salivary cortisol, 54 participants.

Open trials and cohort studies: PTSD

These studies gave everyone ART and measured change. They show that symptom scores fell among people who received ART, and they give a picture of completion rates and session counts. Without a comparison group, they cannot show that ART caused the change.

Open trials and cohort studies: other problems

Outside PTSD, the published work is mostly about cancer-related distress. One study here, the Calgary chart review, is one of only two outcome studies we found with no apparent link to the ART developer network (the other is a four-person OCD study from Iran, listed below).

Case reports and very small studies

Case reports describe what happened for one or a few people. They are where claims about single-session results, OCD, acute stress and young people come from, and they cannot support those claims on their own.

Reviews, evidence briefs and commentaries

The independent ones, including the 2024 systematic review and a 2019 Defense Department evidence brief, reach cautious conclusions. The more enthusiastic pieces are written by people involved in developing, researching or teaching ART.

Registered trials with no results yet

Trial registries show what has been started, not just what has been published. Four completed ART trials have published their results (the 2013 veterans trial, the 2016 veterans cohort, the 2020 grief trial and the 2025 cancer pilot). These have not:

What has not been studied

Searches found no published trial comparing ART with prolonged exposure or with EMDR, and no published result comparing it with CPT. No published study has tested ART delivered by video; every trial was in person. There are no published full studies of ART in children or teenagers, first responders, birth trauma, phobias as a primary problem, moral injury, car accidents or substance use.

That is different from saying ART does not help with those things. It means that anyone who tells you ART is “proven” for them is going beyond the published evidence.

What the evidence adds up to

Read together, the studies say something fairly consistent. In people who received ART, self-reported PTSD symptoms usually fell substantially over a small number of sessions: study participants averaged roughly 3.5 to 4 sessions, with a range of 1 to 5. Most people who started finished. Side effects reported in the trials were uncommon and not serious, though they included temporary low mood, disturbed sleep, more anxiety and more nightmares.

What the studies cannot yet say is how ART compares with the trauma therapies that treatment guidelines recommend first, whether results hold up when a clinician rather than the participant rates the symptoms, and whether they replicate outside the research network that developed ART. Those are the questions the 2024 systematic review and the VA/DoD guideline point to, and they are why the VA/DoD guideline places ART in the “insufficient evidence” category rather than recommending it or recommending against it.

If you are weighing ART against another approach, that is a reasonable conversation to have with any trauma clinician. For many people, cognitive processing therapy, prolonged exposure or EMDR, which have much larger research bases, would be the natural first choice. How ART compares with other trauma therapies sets them side by side.