We note that a closely related pair of young adult primary analyses resulted in nominally significant interactions (p-value < 0.05 before correction for multiple tests) in the hypothesized direction (Supplemental Table S10b). Several factors caution against placing too much confidence in these particular results: (i) failure of positive control – the point estimate for exposure to stress is protective for depression in these two analyses, counter to our more robust analyses and to what would be expected; (ii) they are not supported by closely related analyses – neither the matching analysis based on childhood maltreatment only, nor the other young adult analyses are even nominally significant (Tables S10b, S9, and S10a), and the matching analysis with subjects of all ages has the point estimates of effect in the opposite direction (Table S11b); (iii) statistical instability – these two analyses only include a small number of studies (3 and 4) with a relatively small total sample size (N=583 and N=1142), and are primarily driven by results from a single study; and (iv) neither p-value survives correction for the number of primary analyses performed.
