One of the first studies to explore this idea was a 2006 study in which 18 treatment-resistant depressed patients were randomly selected receive either a single intravenous dose of ketamine or a placebo. The study, funded by the National Institutes of Mental Health, found that depression symptoms improved in a single day for 71 percent of the patients given ketamine. Another small study (with 16 patients total) in the 2010 issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry reported that those who had treatment-resistant bipolar disorder experienced relief from depression-related symptoms in as little as 40 minutes after being given ketamine — much faster than most anti-depressants. And in 2016, an animal study published in Nature found that one of the by-products of ketamine, something called a metabolite, remained in the body of mice for days after the drug was taken, which might explain how ketamine works so quickly and why it can provide relief for up to a week.
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