The following is a summary of “Identifying a stable and generalizable factor structure of major depressive disorder across three large longitudinal cohorts,” published in March 2024 issue of Psychiatry by Tseng et al.
Symptoms of Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) can be measured and tracked by Patient Health Questionnaire 9 (PHQ-9). However, there is a need to identify subfactors of depressive symptoms due to the complexity of MDD.
Researchers conducted a retrospective study identifying reliable and temporally stable subfactors of depressive symptoms by leveraging clinical, large, longitudinal, and diverse datasets.
They analyzed PHQ-9 data of 1,483 depressed individuals for which the participants were recruited between 2017 and 2018. A total of 4,151 PHQ-9 responses were completed throughout the study, with one survey being filled every week for 12 weeks.
The results showed a ranked list of best-fitting models, with the most penurious one achieving good model fit across studies at most time points (average TLI >= 0.90). The final model categorizes the PHQ-9 item into four distinct factors: Affective (Anhedonia + Depressed Mood), Somatic (Sleep = Fatigue + Appetite), Internalizing (Worth/Guilt + Suicidality), Sensorimotor (Concentration + Psychomotor).
Investigators concluded that the identified subfactors offer potential utility in advancing precision psychiatry, enabling the exploration of factor-specific interventions in both research and clinical contexts.
Source: sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165178123006522
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