Ketamine as a prophylactic against stress-induced depressive-like behavior

Background: Stress exposure is one of the greatest risk factors for psychiatric illnesses like Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). However, not all individuals exposed to stress develop affective disorders. Stress resilience, the ability to experience stress without developing persistent psychopathology, varies from individual to individual. Enhancing stress resilience in at-risk populations could potentially protect against stress-induced psychiatric disorders. Despite this fact, no resilience-enhancing pharmaceuticals have been identified.

Methods: Using a chronic social defeat (SD) stress model, learned helplessness (LH), and a chronic corticosterone (CORT) model in mice, we tested if ketamine (K) could protect against depressive-like behavior. Mice were administered a single dose of saline (Sal) or ketamine and then one week later were subjected to 2 weeks of SD, LH training, or 3 weeks of CORT.

Results: SD robustly and reliably induced depressive-like behavior in control (Ctrl) mice. Mice treated with prophylactic ketamine were protected against the deleterious effects of SD in the forced swim test (FST) and in the dominant interaction (DI) test. We confirmed these effects in LH and the CORT model. In the LH model, latency to escape was increased following training—and this effect was prevented by ketamine. In the CORT model, a single dose of ketamine blocked stress-induced behavior in the FST, novelty suppressed feeding (NSF) paradigm, and the sucrose splash test (ST).

Conclusions: These data show that ketamine can induce persistent stress resilience and, therefore, may be useful in protecting against stress-induced disorders.