CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The drug ketamine, which is used as an anesthetic in people and animals, showed promise as a fast-acting treatment for difficult-to-treat cases of depression, according to research published online Wednesday in the American Journal of Psychiatry’s AJP in Advance.
Researchers at the Michael E. Debakey VA Medical Center, Baylor College of Medicine, and Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai studied the drug, which is FDA-approved for use in people as an anesthetic, in a group of 73 patients with treatment-resistant major depression.
Treatment-resistant depression does not respond to an adequate trial of antidepressant medication. About half of people with depression do not respond to an initial treatment, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness, a grassroots mental health advocacy organization. Patients with treatment-resistant depression are more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol, are at greater risk of hospitalization and of attempting suicide.
The study group found that patients who received the drug had greater improvement in symptoms within 24 hours compared to patients who took another pre-surgical anesthetic medication as an “active placebo.” Drug response rates for patients taking ketamine were 64 percent, compared to 28 percent in the active placebo group. About 45 percent of the study participants taking ketamine reported an improvement in depressive symptoms.
One worrying side effect of the drug, which is used as an anesthetic in veterinary medicine and is often abused because of its chemical similarity to PCP, was a potential to cause an increase in blood pressure.
Ketamine has also been shown to rapidly improve symptoms in some bipolar patients in small studies.