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Researchers have just discovered that in depressive patients resistant to antidepressants, ketamine could become a possible alternative treatment. Explanations.
Ketamine for patients resistant to antidepressants?
In order to find an effective treatment for people suffering from severe depression who are resistant to antidepressants, researchers from Inserm, CNRS, Sorbonne University and doctors from AP-HP at the Institut du Cerveau, are focused on researching the still unknown mechanisms of action of a drug: ketamine.
The reason : “conventional antidepressant treatments take time to act (on average three weeks) while ketamine produces a rapid antidepressant effect, only a few hours after its administration”underline the researchers of the study.
To carry out this research, 26 antidepressant resistant (TRD) patients and 30 healthy controls were recruited. These participants were between the ages of 18 and 70. In addition, the patients as well as the healthy subjects first estimated the probability of occurrence in their life of 40 “negative” events (for example having a car accident, being diagnosed with cancer or even losing one’s wallet).
During the study, TRD patients received 3 administrations of ketamine (ie 0.5 mg/kg over 40 minutes) in one week. As for the healthy control participants, they were monitored twice 1 week apart without exposure to ketamine.
Study results
Published in the medical journal JAMA Psychiatry, the results demonstrated that ketamine treatment induced a rapid and significant decrease in Montgomery and Asberg Depression Scale (MADRS) scores 4 hours after an initial ketamine infusion. Moreover, they remained significantly lower than baseline scores one week later.
“Only four hours after the first administration, patients’ ability to update their beliefs in the face of positive information was increased. They became less sensitive to negative information, and regained an ability to update their knowledge comparable to that of control subjects. The greater the capacity to update patients’ beliefs, the greater the improvement in symptoms.“, explain the researchers.
In other words, ketamine enabled these patients with resistant depression to “be positive”. According to the researchers, “this work paves the way for new research into antidepressant therapies that modulate belief updating mechanisms”.