A Mystery Partly Solved: How the 'Club Drug' Ketamine Lifts Depression So Quickly
By Maia Szalavitz Wednesday, June 15, 2011A new study sheds light on why the anesthetic and "club drug" ketamine can relieve depression rapidly — in hours, instead of weeks or months. The findings may help provide new targets for developing antidepressants and increase researchers' understanding of the devastating disorder.
The study, published in the journal Nature, offer support for wider use of ketamine in depression and suggests new leads for scientists aiming to create fast-acting drugs with fewer side effects. A drug that could relieve depression quickly has long been sought by pharmaceutical companies and patients: for the 20 million Americans suffering from depression, the early weeks of treatment are a high-risk time for suicide, which kills nearly 35,000 people each year.
The new research involved numerous experiments in mice aimed at teasing out what happens to both brain and behavior when ketamine takes effect. In one such test, mice were forced to swim in a water-filled tube that they cannot escape. Previous research has shown that mice given antidepressants swim longer before giving up: a sign that the drugs are working.
The new study found that just one dose of ketamine produced the same effect in a half an hour — compared with the weeks or months this can take with standard antidepressants, in mice as well as in humans. Further, the new study found that the antidepressant effect of a single dose of ketamine lasted for a week.
(More on TIME.com: How a Study of a Failed Antidepressant Shows That Antidepressants Really Work)
"It's a nice, elegant experiment," says Carlos Zarate, chief of experimental therapeutics of the mood and anxiety disorders program at the National Institute of Mental Health and author of an early randomized trial of ketamine for depression. He was not associated with the study. "It's very good work," he adds.
No comments:
Post a Comment