October 1, 2020
Laura Musazzi
1 citation
Intranasal esketamine has been recently approved by both the American Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the European Medicines Agency (EMA) for treatment-resistant depression in adults and will be soon clinically available also in Italy. Esketamine is the (S) enantiomer of ketamine, a non-competitive N-Methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) glutamate receptor antagonist, introduced in clinics as...
Journal of Affective Disorders
September 23, 2020
Anees Bahji, Gustavo Vazquez, Carlos A. Zarate
404 citations
Background: Ketamine appears to have a therapeutic role in certain mental disorders, most notably depression. However, the comparative performance of different formulations of ketamine is less clear. Objectives: This study aimed to assess the comparative efficacy and tolerability of racemic and esketamine for the treatment of unipolar and bipolar major depression. Design: Systematic review and...
Pharmacology, Biochemistry, and Behavior
September 22, 2020
Kennett D. Radford, Rina Y. Berman, Michael Zhang et al.
Ketamine, a multimodal dissociative anesthetic drug, is widely used to treat various conditions including acute pain and treatment-resistant depression. We previously reported that subanesthetic doses of intravenous (i.v.) ketamine produced transient dissociative stereotypy and antinociception in male rats. However, sex-related differences in the effects of i.v. ketamine on these measures are...
Anesthesiology
September 18, 2020
Boris D. Heifets
3 citations
IF ketamine were an animal, it would have to be an octopus: unique, endlessly mutable, potentially dangerous, devilishly complicated to study, and seeming to extend its grasp into every corner of medicine. In the 50 years ketamine has been commercially available in the United States, practitioners and researchers have called it an analgesic, antidepressant, anti-inflammatory agent, dissociative...
Journal of Psychoactive Drugs
September 15, 2020
Tracey Varker, Loretta Watson, Kari Gibson et al.
57 citations
The aim of this systematic review was to examine the efficacy of MDMA, ketamine, LSD, and psilocybin for the treatment of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). A search of four databases for English language, peer-reviewed literature published from inception to 18th October 2019 yielded 2,959 records, 34 of which were screened on full-text. Observational studies and RCTs which tested the...
Molecular Psychiatry
September 14, 2020
A. Mkrtchian, Jennifer W. Evans, Christoph Kraus et al.
110 citations
Ketamine improves motivation-related symptoms in depression but simultaneously elicits similar symptoms in healthy individuals, suggesting that it might have different effects in health and disease. This study examined whether ketamine affects the brain’s fronto-striatal system, which is known to drive motivational behavior. The study also assessed whether inflammatory mechanisms—which are...
Pharmacology, Biochemistry, and Behavior
September 11, 2020
F. Guarraci, Maryam Ali, Chantal M. F. Gonzalez et al.
The present study characterized the effects of weekly ketamine injections on sexual behavior and anxiety in female and male rats, using a dosing protocol that mimics human therapeutic treatment for depression. In Experiment 1A, ketamine (10 mg/kg, i.p.) or saline was injected once per week for four consecutive weeks. The partner preference paradigm was used to measure sexual motivation 30 min...
International Journal of Research in Pharmaceutical Sciences
September 11, 2020
Depression is a mood disorder; it affects a person's life in all terms of his daily life. Normally depressions are mood swings exposed as feelings which may be sadness, loss, anger, even laughter. Depression now stands first than any other psychological illness is causing increased mortality in the population. Major depressive disorders [MDD] is one of the major causes of mortality in the...
Frontiers in Psychiatry
September 8, 2020
Leo R. Silberbauer, B. Spurny, P. Handschuh et al.
43 citations
Introduction Converging evidence suggests that ketamine elicits antidepressant effects via enhanced neuroplasticity precipitated by a surge of glutamate and modulation of GABA. Magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging (MRSI) illustrates changes to cerebral glutamate and GABA immediately following ketamine administration during dissociation. However, few studies assess subacute changes in the...
Anesthesiology
September 4, 2020
Jacob Gitlin, Shubham Chamadia, J. Locascio et al.
48 citations
Background: Ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic with analgesic properties. Ketamine’s analgesic properties have been suggested to result from its dissociative properties. To the authors’ knowledge, this postulate is unsubstantiated. The authors hypothesize that the dissociative and analgesic properties of ketamine are independent. Methods: The authors conducted a single-site, open-label study...