Introduction
depression, psychic anxiety, depressed mood
The clinical response to selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) in depression takes weeks to be fully developed [A recent comprehensive post hoc analysis [An interesting next step would be to focus on the interrelatedness of clinical symptoms. In the past decade, network estimation techniques have shown to be valuable in unraveling the complex relations between symptoms [SSRIs were directly related to larger reductions in the two considered affective symptoms (i.e., depressed mood and psychic anxiety), which were related to considerable reductions in specific other -mainly cognitive- symptoms [This will be the first study that uses network estimation techniques to shed light on the clinical response to SSRIs relative to placebo by considering individual symptoms after 1, 2, 3, 4 and 6 weeks of treatment. For this purpose, we used individual patient data from 28 industry-sponsored placebo-controlled SSRI trials as previously described [