14 DAY TRIAL // A team of experts in the United States has discovered that administering ketamine intranasally to depressed patients produces an almost-immediate antidepressant response, compared to other approaches. The new study shows that relief was experienced by patients suffering from treatment-resistant major depressive disorder (MDD) within 24 hours of taking ketamine.
The drug, which is generally used in combination with a sedative to induce and maintain general anesthesia in humans and animals, has been shown in a large-scale study to increase depression and impair memory, including verbal, short-term and visual memory. However, experts with the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital found a way to make it work against depression.
In a paper published in the April 2 online issue of the peer-reviewed journal Biological Psychiatry, the team details an experiment conducted on 20 MDD patients, which revealed that 8 participants exhibited a response to the treatment. Just one test participant in the control group – who were given a saline solution instead of ketamine – exhibited the same response.
“There is an urgent clinical need for new treatments for depression with novel mechanisms of action. With further research and development, this could lay the groundwork for using [such] treatments for major depressive disorder,” says the principal investigator of the study, James W. Murrough, MD. He is the associate director of the Mood and Anxiety Disorders Program at the Icahn School of Medicine.