4.3. Strengths and limitations
TCM syndrome, Depression
VIRUS, RECRUITMENT
There are a few strengths of the current trial. First, to ensure we recruited women with similar presentation, we not only selected perimenopausal women with comorbid PMD and PMI, but also limited recruitment to one specific type of TCM syndrome diagnosis “Depression of Due to its preliminary nature, some limitations of this trial should be acknowledged. First, larger than anticipated cases lost to follow-up forced us to use multiple imputation approach to replace the missing data. Started in March 2022 and lasted for more than 3 months, Shanghai witnessed the China's worst outbreak of SARS-CoV-2 virus since early 2020 (