In large collaborative studies symptom-level data necessary to apply more sophisticated data-driven techniques may not be available in all involved cohorts. For this reason we additionally tested an alternative parsimonious sub-phenotyping strategy using only information on the direction of change in appetite and weight, as these were the symptoms with the highest discriminative power between subtypes (Supplemental Methods). Among the 1,477 patients with available data, two subtypes, namely “decreased appetite/weight” (39.7% of sample) and “increased appetite/weight” (26.2%), were defined by the presence of, respectively, decrease or increase in at least one of the two symptoms. The proportion of MDD cases with lifetime anxiety disorder did not differ across typical and atypical subtypes (respectively, 84.7% and 81.3%; p=0.33), nor across decreased and increased appetite/weight subtypes (respectively, 76.3% and 80.3%; p=0.15). Supplemental eFigure 1 summarizes the number of subjects included/excluded for both sub-phenotyping strategies.
