Ketamine Use For Treatment-Resistant Depression
Researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center have announced that they have made new strides in finding effective therapies for treatment-resistant depression. The researchers blocked the NMDA receptors in the brain with the ketamine drug, which caused antidepressant results in patients with treatment-resistant depression. Although ketamine has become notorious as an abused street drug, it was initially developed as an anesthetic. However, ketamine can produce unwanted side effects in patients, such as hallucinations and addiction to the drug.
Researchers began by studying memantine, an FDA approved drug used to Alzheimer’s disease. Which acts on the same receptors as ketamine. However, memantine does not act as rapidly as ketamine, for reasons not fully understood by scientists. “Although both ketamine and memantine have similar actions when nerve cells are active, under resting conditions, memantine is less effective in blocking nerve cell communication compared to ketamine. This fundamental difference in their action could explain why memantine has not been effective as a rapid antidepressant,” said Lisa Monteggia, a professor of neuroscience at the UT Southwestern Medical Center.
Antidepressants continue as a subject for pharmaceutical research because depression is a growing disorder. According to the American Psychiatric Association, 1 in 10 people over the age of 12 in the US take anti-depressants. rom 1988-1994 to 2005-2008, antidepressant usage increased nearly 400 percent, with women more than two and a half times more likely to take antidepressants. Between 2005 and 2008, antidepressants were the 3rd most common prescription drug in the US, and the most common drug used by patients ages 18 to 44. F