The concern Moffitt and Caspi raised regarding the inclusion of lifetime depression analyses was the difficulty of knowing the relative timing of stress and depression for a lifetime phenotype. Rather than omit these analyses of lifetime depression, as suggested by Moffitt and Caspi, we included analyses where timing information was specifically queried as well as analyses where it was not specifically queried. We recognize that these data, like all data, have limitations, but nonetheless we find the results informative. We note that of all the models examined in our de novo analyses, the only results with nominally significant interaction terms in the hypothesized direction were based on lifetime depression outcomes. Finally, based on parameter estimates provided in the supplement to their seminal paper,16 we can estimate the impact those data would have on both our young adult and all-age analyses involving depression diagnoses with a quantitative life stress variable. We found that none of these analyses were nominally significant even after adding the Caspi et al. (2003) results to the meta-analyses.
