Clinical drug investigation
June 13, 2026
Angel Prabakar
Ketamine has revolutionized the treatment of mood disorders by offering rapid antidepressant effects, particularly in individuals with treatment-resistant depression. Unlike traditional monoaminergic antidepressants, ketamine acts primarily through antagonism of the N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptor, initiating a cascade of glutamatergic signaling that promotes synaptic plasticity,...
Journal of Surgery and Medicine
June 11, 2026
Davon Lee, Elizabeth Beyene, Da’Jhai Monroe et al.
Background/Aim: Ketamine is frequently administered for analgesia and sedation during burn dressing changes, but its potential psychological impact remains a concern. This study assessed whether ketamine exposure during early burn care is associated with subsequent depression, acute stress reaction (ASR), or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in patients with major burns. Methods: A...
Australasian Psychiatry
June 11, 2026
Eden Mane, Saras Mane
ObjectivesTo systematically review the effectiveness, safety, and care models of telehealth-supported ketamine for depression and/or anxiety in adults and consider implications for Australasian clinical practice.MethodsFollowing PRISMA 2020, we searched for randomised or observational studies of adults receiving at-home telehealth-supported ketamine for depression and/or anxiety, to August...
Journal of Psychedelic Studies
June 10, 2026
Sina Susanna Schüttler, John Nathaniel Parker, Daniel Münster
Psychedelic therapies are moving from the margins of medicine into clinical practice, bringing unresolved ethical questions to the forefront. Among them, ketamine-assisted psychotherapy (KAP) has gained the widest medical acceptance, particularly for treatment-resistant depression (TRD). In August 2025, this development reached a new stage as Norway became the first country to approve...
Journal of Psychoactive Drugs
June 10, 2026
Jack H Buchanan, Brandon Reynante, Michael T. Dinh et al.
Ketamine-assisted psychotherapy (KAP) is an emerging treatment approach that may enhance ketamine's antidepressant effects through neuroplastic synergism or transformative psychological experience. Despite growing clinical use, real-world KAP practices remain understudied. This cross-sectional survey examined the practices of fifty licensed KAP providers treating depression, recruited from a...
ChemRxiv
June 9, 2026
Matthew Gardner, Alexander Power, Anca Frinculescu et al.
preprint
High-dose MDMA tablets and variable-purity cocaine and ketamine samples are commonly encountered by drug checking services and police forces in the United Kingdom and Europe. At the time of writing, there are few simpleto-operate field-portable technologies that provide semi-quantitative information on MDMA tablet dosage or cocaine and ketamine purity at the point of sampling. We previously...
Fortschritte der Neurologie · Psychiatrie
June 8, 2026
Udo Bonnet, Norbert Scherbaum, Georg Juckel et al.
Introduction: Esketamine nasal spray (EN) has been approved in Germany since 2021 for the treatment of treatment-resistant depression (TRD). Historically, the development of EN resulted from the positive results of randomized clinical trials on the off-label use of subnarcotic ketamine infusions (SKI) for TRD. How effective, tolerable, and safe is off-label SKI compared to EN? Methods: Narrativ...
Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews
June 7, 2026
Yoav Domany, Aviv Solomon-Shashua
Suicide, the individual desire to take one's own life, at whose core lies the unbearable psychological pain Shneidman called psychache, is a uniquely human experience. Unlike depression, suicidality has no preclinical analog. Suicidality and chronic depression, long treated as a single clinical entity, are increasingly recognized as partly separable in neurobiology and treatment response....
Neuropharmacology
June 6, 2026
Devin P Hagarty, Adam Dawoud, Alfonso Brea Guerrero et al.
Ketamine, a non-competitive N-Methyl-D-Aspartate receptor antagonist, was approved for use with Treatment-Resistant Depression (TRD) and is currently in clinical trials for treating substance use disorder (SUD), and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. However, ketamine is an addictive drug, and thus we need to better understand ketamine's mechanism of action in addiction to reliably assess the...
Psychopharmacology Bulletin
June 5, 2026
Keming Gao, Evrim Bayrak Oruc, Heather Wobbe et al.
To compare the efficacy and safety of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) and ketamine infusion (KET-IFU) in routine care for patients with bipolar I or II depression (BPD). Electronic medical records of patients who received ECT and/or KET-IFU were used to identify patients with BPD who received both ECT and KET-IFU treatments. The change in the 16-item Quick Inventory of Depressive Symptomatology...