- Clinical trial participants who had treatment-resistant depression received injections of racemic ketamine or a placebo twice a week over a month.
- Approximately one in five participants achieved total remission of their symptoms with ketamine, while almost a third saw their symptoms improve by at least 50%.
- The study was a collaboration between six clinical mood disorder centers in Australia and one in New Zealand.
A growing number of researchers are looking at psychedelics, a range of substances that can alter consciousness, as a possible treatment for depression.
Many are interested, specifically, in ketamine, a drug that has been used as an anesthetic for decades.
The British Journal of Psychiatry recently published a paper on a double-blind trial out of Australia that compared the ability of racemic ketamine to a placebo in reducing the symptoms of treatment-resistant depression.
Treatment-resistant depression is defined as depression that does not respond to two or more lines of treatment.
In 2019, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved Spravato (esketamine), a commercially developed nasal spray, for treatment-resistant depression in adults and for depressive symptoms in adults with major depressive disorder with acute suicidal ideation.
Racemic ketamine is also
For the current study, led by researchers at the University of New South Wales Sydney (UNSW) and the affiliated Black Dog Institute, participants received twice-weekly injections of racemic ketamine or a placebo.
Dr. Colleen Loo, lead researcher on the trial and a clinical psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry at UNSW, told Medical News Today that she began looking at the effects of ketamine on depression in 2011. Previously,…
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