Clinical Characteristics of Major Depression That Predict Risk of Depression in Relatives

Major depression (MD) is both clinically and etiologically heterogeneous. We attempt to relate clinical and etiologic heterogeneity by determining those features of MD that reflect a high familial liability to depressive illness.Our sample, 3786 personally interviewed twin pairs from a population-based registry, contained 1765 people with a lifetime history of MD by DSM-III-R criteria, of whom 639 (36.2%) had affected co-twins. We examine, using...