Time-Varying Network Models for the Temporal Dynamics of Depressive Symptomatology in Patients With Depressive Disorders: Secondary Analysis of Longitudinal Observational Data

Background As depression is highly heterogenous, an increasing number of studies investigate person-specific associations of depressive symptoms in longitudinal data. However, most studies in this area of research conceptualize symptom interrelations to be static and time invariant, which may lead to important temporal features of the disorder being missed. Objective To reveal the dynamic nature of depression, we aimed to use a recently developed technique to investigate whether and how associations among depressive symptoms change over time. Methods Using daily data (mean length 274, SD 82 d) of 20 participants with depression, we modeled idiographic associations among depressive symptoms, rumination, sleep, and quantity and quality of social contacts as dynamic networks using time-varying vector autoregressive models. Results The resulting models showed marked interindividual and intraindividual differences. For some participants, associations among variables changed in the span of some weeks, whereas they stayed stable over months for others. Our results further indicated nonstationarity in all participants. Conclusions Idiographic symptom networks can provide insights into the temporal course of mental disorders and open new avenues of research for the study of the development and stability of psychopathological processes.