Reviews Technology: Depression treated in a few hours by ketamine!

Ketamine could become the new effective antidepressant and especially fast. The depression would be improved in patients resistant to other treatments and this in a few hours.

Depression strikes about 17 million American adults each year. Depression is not a disease to take lightly, especially since many cases are not diagnosed. It is often a disorder caused or aggravated by a combination of factors (psychological, genetic, social and biological) resulting severity of the disease more or less advanced. There are currently psychotherapeutic treatment but drug that aims to address the biological abnormalities.

Antidepressants act primarily on nerve pathways, promoting the flow of nerve information is usually affected. Their action is localized at synapses, where they improve the passage of neurotransmitters to neurons following. Yet most of them have a very slow mechanism of action and the first effects are felt only after several weeks or months of treatment. They must also be taken very regularly and over a long duration so that their effects are optimal.

It is not easy to treat depression, especially since nearly 40% of patients do not respond positively to treatments. Researchers at Yale University in the United States published in the journal Science their work on a promising compound, already known, but whose use has been hijacked: ketamine.

Ketamine does become the antidepressant miracle? © ThomasThomas / Creative Commons License

Synapses are reconstructed

This molecule is commonly used in anesthesia, including children and patients with unknown liabilities not medical (the accident) as it is effective and safe. Ketamine, however, is more widely used for its psychoactive effects, sought by users of ketamine as a drug may cause visions of near death experiences.

According to American researchers, ketamine could well become the miracle molecule anti-depression. Indeed, there is a dozen years, researchers at the Connecticut Mental Health Center have found positive effects of ketamine on patients suffering from severe depression. Nearly 70% patients developed resistance to other treatments have been improved within few hours.The administration of ketamine, intravenously under medical care, however, was an obstacle to the use of the molecule, as well as its psychoactive effects.

By testing the compound on rats with depression, scientists have shown that ketamine had a positive effect on their behavior. The more detailed analysis of the brains of rats in the prefrontal cortex, has noted that the molecule also allowed synaptogenesis, the mechanism responsible for the recovery of synaptic connections between neurons damaged by chronic stress. A core protein called mTOR synaptogenesis would be strongly and rapidly activated by ketamine.

Ronald Duman, responsible for such work concludes that ketamine "is like a magic medicine: a dose produces a rapid and lasts for seven to ten days." The discovery of its mechanism of action should help to develop molecules with a more precise mode of action (perhaps by targeting the following steps), but equally effective.