How many different ways do patients meet the diagnostic criteria for major depressive disorder?

There are 227 possible ways to meet the symptom criteria for major depressive disorder (MDD). However, symptom occurrence is not random, and some symptoms co-occur significantly beyond chance. This raises the questions of whether all of the theoretically possible different ways of meeting the MDD criteria actually occur in patients, and whether some combinations of criteria are much more common than others. More than 1500 patients who met DSM-IV criteria for MDD at the time of the evaluation were interviewed with semi-structured interviews.

Source: Comprehensive Psychiatry - September 6, 2014 Category: Psychiatry Authors: Mark Zimmerman, William Ellison, Diane Young, Iwona Chelminski, Kristy Dalrymple Source Type: research