PONE-D-24-23747Identifying Depression Subtypes and Investigating their Consistency and Transitions in a 1-Year Cohort AnalysisPLOS ONE

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

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Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: Dear Editors and Authors,

Thank you for the privilege of reviewing the manuscript titled "Identifying Depression Subtypes and Investigating their Consistency and Transitions in a 1-Year Cohort Analysis". In it, the authors describe a clustering analysis of patients with depression over a one year period, using latent class and latent transition analysis to determine subtypes of depression over this period of time.

Strengths

1. Well written introduction that clearly outlines the contribution of this work.

2. Thank you for sharing your code, that is an important step to ensure reproducibility.

3. Good use of a relatively real-world dataset.

4. Great coaching of results with respect to other literature and past work, e.g. the Van Loo et al statement.

5. Very well written and easy to read.

Minor Comments

1. Please mention your specific multiple comparison correction in the text, I found it only in a table caption.

2. There is a missing closing paren on line 38 or 39.

3. Is there a legend for Figure 1, or otherwise somewhere where we can understand which group is which?

I have no Major Comments.

Reviewer #2: Dear Authors,

First, I would like to extend my congratulations on conducting a very interesting study. I have some comments regarding the report.

The study titled “Identifying Depression Subtypes and Investigation their Consistency and Transitions in a 1- Year Cohort Analysis” focuses on, as the title indicates, identifying depression subtypes, as well as examining the consistency and transitions of this subtypes over time. The study identifies four different classes of depression subtypes and demonstrates that these classes remain stable over a one-year period, with participants generally tending to remain within the same class through this time.

Introduction:

Line 29: it’s not mentioned which version of DSM you are referring to.

Method:

I would prefer to see a figure her, where the participant flow is shown, drop-out etc.

Results:

Line 201: figure 1 is not presented in the text. It makes it hard to understand the differences between the different groups. I think it also would be wise to go more in depth in the different symptoms of depression that you are investigating.

In the attachments, figure 1 is missing explanations on the different colors in the figure.

Line 208: Class 3 (“moderate”) overall presented with 208 probabilities lower than Class 1 or 3 but higher than Class 4. I think it is a typing error where class 2 and 3 have been mixed up.

Line 238: Figure 2 is missing.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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Identifying Depression Subtypes and Investigating their Consistency and Transitions in a 1-Year Cohort Analysis

PONE-D-24-23747R1

Dear Dr. Oetzmann,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

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Kind regards,

Wajid Mumtaz

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: All comments have been addressed

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2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

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3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

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5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: Thank you for the revisions, I have no further comments and support publication of this manuscript..

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If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

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