High-order brain interactions during ketamine-induced state changes: A functional marker of response in late-life treatment-resistant depression?

Abstract

Ketamine is a fast-acting intervention for treatment-resistant depression (TRD), yet only a subset of patients show robust clinical response, and the underlying neural mechanisms remain unclear. High-order interactions (HOI) derived from multivariate information theory provide a framework for examining nonlinear dependencies among brain regions beyond pairwise connectivity. One such metric, the O-information, captures the balance between synergistic and redundant interactions across three or more variables. In this secondary analysis of a randomized, double-blind, midazolam-controlled trial (NCT02556606), we examined EEG-derived HOI in 30 late-life veterans with TRD following a single 40-minute intravenous infusion of ketamine (0.1, 0.25, 0.5 mg/kg; n = 18) or midazolam (0.03 mg/kg; n = 12). Resting state and mismatch negativity data were analyzed at baseline, 1 h, 24 h, and 7 d post-infusion. Ketamine induced temporally dynamic alterations in redundancy-dominant O-info, with maximal effects in the alpha-band at 1 h (Cohen's d = 2.57), attenuation at 24 h that shifted toward the theta-band, and partial resurgence in beta and gamma by Day 7. Linear mixed-effects modeling identified significant group effects across most band x metric families, with the strongest effects in alpha, beta, and gamma redundancy. Greater increases in 24-hour alpha-band redundancy were associated with greater improvement in depressive symptoms at Day 7 (β = 69.31, q = 0.05). HOI metrics also tracked acute dissociative states, with several 24-hour alpha and beta features remaining positively associated with symptom severity after correction. These findings extend prior HOI work in healthy samples to a controlled TRD cohort and suggest that ketamine induces temporally structured reorganization of higher-order brain interactions, with exploratory associations to clinical outcomes.