Ketamine for major depression: New tool, new questions
According to a 2019, Harvard University report, “If a person responds to ketamine, it can rapidly reduce suicidality (life-threatening thoughts and act) and relieve other serious symptoms of depression. Ketamine also can be effective for treating depression combined with anxiety. Other treatments for suicidal thoughts and depression often take weeks or even months to take effect, and some people need to try several medications or approaches to gain relief. This is true for talk therapies, antidepressant medicines, transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), and electroconvulsive therapy (ECT), which is currently the most effective treatment for major depression that fails to respond to other therapies.
Treating Depression: An Expert Discusses Risks, Benefits of Ketamine
A 2017 Yale Medicine article that describes how “Up to a third of patients with depression don’t respond to traditional forms of treatment. For those patients, the dark fog that hovers over their lives feels like it will never lift. But a new treatment called ketamine has recently made waves all over the internet. Hailed as a “miracle drug” and the first major antidepressant breakthrough in three decades, ketamine has improved the lives of many patients whose depression had dominated their lives for years.”
https://www.yalemedicine.org/news/ketamine-the-new-miracle-drug
Ketamine & Depression: How it Works
Yale Medicine Explains – In this 2021 Youtube video, Yale Medicine describes how researchers have worked for decades to better understand the neurobiology behind depression. Data is beginning to suggest that it may be something much larger than the neurotransmitters serotonin and norepinephrine and may involve other neurotransmitters such as GABA and Glutamate. These chemicals are involved in neuroplasticity, which is the brain’s ability to adapt to change and protect itself against stressful events. Ketamine works those two neurotransmitters and was discovered to have rapid antidepressant effects. Some experience an improvement in symptoms in 24 hours or less. “We think that one of the things that Ketamine does, that helps to explain its antidepressant effects, is help the brain to regrow the synapses, the connections between nerve cells.” New therapies like ketamine are changing how depression is understood and may pave the way for future research that helps us understand the brain in all of its complexity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nW21-AYY_fs
Ketamine Relieve Depression By Restoring Brain Connections
An NPR report on how this discovery “represents maybe one of the biggest findings in the field over the last 50 years,” say Ron Duman, a psychiatrist and neurobiologist. “Depression is associated with a loss of so-called synaptic connections between nerve cells. A healthy neuron looks like a tree in spring with lots of branches and leaves extending toward synaptic connections with other neurons. What happens in depression is there’s a shriveling of these branches and these leaves and it looks like a tree in winter. And a drug like ketamine does make the tree look like one back in spring. There’s also indirect evidence that ketamine is restoring synaptic connections in people.
Ketamine May Reduce Depression, Suicidal Thoughts Within Hours
Forbes article discussing the research from a study out of the Americal Journal of Psychiatry that showed Ketamine seems to reduce symptoms of depression very quickly, and in people who haven’t been helped by traditional antidepressants. It also found that for depressed people who have suicidal thoughts, it may help alleviate these thoughts much faster than anything that exists currently—within hours.