Could the Club Drug Ketamine Treat Depression?

People have long used club drug Ketamine to get high at parties, but a growing body of research suggests it may also be an effective way to treat depression.

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.


However, in a new study in JAMA, an American Psychiatric Association task force says that ketamine isn’t ready to be considered a “primetime” treatment for depression. They stress that while the available research suggests a rapid initial antidepressant effect, there’s no research on the long-term effects and safety.

Plus, chronic use of ketamine has been linked to heart and bladder problems. Additionally, a study in 2009 that followed 150 ketamine users found that while occasional use of the drug (defined as once or twice a month or less) didn’t necessarily have any lasting impacts, people who used it every day experienced memory loss, cognitive impairment, and delusions.

And perhaps more importantly, it’s addictive. “The last thing we would want to do as a field would be to promote the use of a substance to treat depression that turns out to have tremendous abuse liability, and that would end up creating a cadre of depressed patients who are now, in addition to that, substance abusers,” Charles Nemeroff, chair of the APA task force and professor at the University of Miami’s Miller School of Medicine, told Time magazine.

Ketamine’s addictive properties haven’t stopped clinics from popping up around the country, where ketamine is then prescribed off-label in low doses to treat depression and other mood disorders. Not all of these clinics are staffed by psychiatrists or mental health professionals, which worries Nemeroff. “I worry about how well people are screened, and because this is a drug of abuse,” whether people are screened for abuse as well,” he told Time in an earlier interview.

“If we give ketamine to someone who is suicidal, and they’re no longer suicidal, do we let them go? What happens the next day or two days later? Does the suicidality come back? These are the kinds of questions we need to know the answer to,” he said.
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Article source: http://www.menshealth.com/health/could-ketamine-treat-depression