Australasian Psychiatry
August 1, 2016
Shalini Arunogiri, Nicholas A Keks, Judy Hope
Objective: There has been widespread interest from the public and media in the potential of ketamine as a novel treatment for depression. This paper reviews whether current evidence supports the use of ketamine for the clinical treatment of depression. Conclusions: Clinical trials have investigated the use of intravenous ketamine for the treatment of depressive symptoms over the past 15 years....
Depression and Anxiety
August 2016
William V Bobo, Jennifer L. Vande Voort, Paul E Croarkin et al.
There is an urgent need for more rapidly effective pharmacotherapies for major depressive disorder and bipolar disorder (BP) that are efficacious and tolerable for depressed patients who respond poorly to conventional treatments. Multiple controlled trials have now demonstrated a rapid, nonsustained antidepressive response to a single intravenous infusion of ketamine. Early controlled studies...
The Brown University Psychopharmacology Update
August 1, 2016
Intravenous ketamine administered twice a week or three times a week resulted in sustained antidepressant effects compared with placebo in a group of patients with treatment‐resistant depression, a new study has found. Based on similar results between the two dosing frequencies, the researchers indicated that a twice‐weekly regimen could serve as an initial repeated‐dose strategy in this...
International Journal of Medical Students
July 27, 2016
Patrick Arthur Twohig, Vaughn Huckfeldt
A lack of effective treatment for patients with treatment-resistant depression (TRD) has led to the evaluation of ketamine, an N-methyl- D-aspartate receptor antagonist. Despite the demonstrated short-term benefits of using intravenous (IV) ketamine, side effects and the difficulty in administering ketamine outside the health-care setting has raised interest in alternative dosage forms....
Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica
July 1, 2016
C. Loo, Verònica Gálvez, E. O'Keefe et al.
This pilot study assessed the feasibility, efficacy and safety of an individual dose‐titration approach, and of the intravenous (IV), intramuscular (IM) and subcutaneous (SC) routes for treating depression with ketamine.
Therapeutic Advances in Psychopharmacology
June 2016
John Muller, Sahana Pentyala, James Dilger et al.
Recent evidence has suggested that the N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor antagonist ketamine shows significant therapeutic effects in major depression and bipolar disorder. This effect is especially important in treatment-resistant depression and depression with suicidal ideation. In this review we explain the mechanism of action, drug efficacy, and the side effects of ketamine; the antidepressive...
Current behavioral neuroscience reports
June 1, 2016
Dawn F. Ionescu, George I. Papakostas
Traditional antidepressant medications generally take weeks-to-months to achieve effect. However, the breakthrough finding of ketamine's rapidly acting antidepressant properties has inspired a decade-and-a-half of progress towards the identification of treatments that work quickly-within hours-to-days. This paradigm-shift in the discovery of antidepressant therapies has significantly changed...
The International Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology
May 27, 2016
P. Jack, B. Massimiliano, Grazia di Capua et al.
Abstract Objective: One third of major depressive disorder (MDD) patients are unresponsive to antidepressant drugs, a sub-type known as treatment resistant depression (TRD). Acute intravenous administration of ketamine at sub-anaesthetic dosage is the only efficacious pharmacological treatment in TRD. Development of TRD preclinical assays to screen for more efficacious antidepressant drugs and...
Biological Psychiatry
May 12, 2016
Marc S. Lener, Mark J. Niciu, E. Ballard et al.
In patients with major depressive disorder (MDD) or bipolar disorder (BD), abnormalities in excitatory and/or inhibitory neurotransmission and neuronal plasticity may lead to aberrant functional connectivity patterns within large brain networks. Network dysfunction in association with altered brain levels of glutamate (Glu) and gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) have been identified in both animal...
Neuroscience Letters
May 4, 2016
Tracey L Petryshen, Michael Lewis, Kelly A Dennehy et al.
Current medications for depression typically require weeks of treatment before significant clinical improvement is observed, and are only effective in a relatively small subset of patients. Recent human clinical studies have demonstrated that ketamine, an NMDA receptor antagonist, and scopolamine, a muscarinic acetylcholine receptor antagonist, produce rapid antidepressant responses within...