People with treatment-resistant depression experienced symptom relief in as little as two hours with a single intravenous dose of ketamine, a medication usually used in higher doses as an anesthetic in humans and animals, in a preliminary study. Current antidepressants routinely take eight weeks or more to exert their effect in treatment-resistant patients and four to six weeks in more responsive patients a major drawback of these medications. Some participants in this study, who previously had tried an average of six medications without relief, continued to show benefits over the next seven days after just a single dose of the experimental treatment, according to researchers conducting the study at the National Institutes of Health's National Institute of Mental Health.
This is among the first studies of humans to examine the effects of ketamine on depression, a debilitating illness that affects 14.8 million people in any given year. Used in very low doses, the medication is important for research, but is unlikely to become a widely used clinical treatment for depression because of potential side effects, including hallucinations and euphoria, at higher doses. However, scientists say this research could point the way toward development of a new class of faster- and -longer-acting medications. None of the patients in this study, all of whom received a low dose, had serious side effects. Study results were published in the August issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry.
"The public health implications of being able to treat major depression this quickly would be enormous," said NIH Director Elias A. Zerhouni, M.D. "These new findings demonstrate the importance of developing new classes of antidepressants that are not simply variations of existing medications."
For this study 18 treatment-resistant, depressed patients were randomly assigned to receive either a single intravenous dose of ketamine or a placebo (inactive compound). Depression im
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Contact: Susan Cahill
NIMHpress@nih.gov
301-443-4536
NIH/National Institute of Mental Health
7-Aug-2006