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My boyfriend's stepbrother is actually involved in one of the studies down at Yale. I am wildly curious as to how it will go, and really hope they can improve the treatment of depression altogether.
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From NPR
There's no quick fix for severe depression. Although antidepressants like Prozac have been around since the 1970s, they usually take weeks to make a difference. And for up to 40 percent of patients, they simply don't work. As a result, there are limited options when patients show up in an emergency room with suicidal depression. The doctors and nurses at Ben Taub General Hospital in Houston say they see this problem every day.
You can get a sense of what they're up against by visiting the cavernous, bustling emergency center at Ben Taub, which is part of the massive Texas Medical Center. More than 100,000 patients a year get emergency care here, and about 5,000 of them need psychiatric evaluation.
The hospital's 24-hour Psychiatric Emergency Center gets a steady stream of people with suicidal depression, says Charlzetta McMurray-Horton, who is in charge of mental health nursing.
"If the police bring them in, they're going to come through this door," McMurray-Horton says, pointing to one entrance. "If the ambulance brings them in, they're going to come through this door," she says, pointing to a different entrance.
And one of the challenges in treating these severely depressed patients is that there simply isn't any drug that provides quick relief, says Anu Matorin, medical director of the Psychiatric Emergency Center. Matorin talks about one recent patient. The woman had suffered bouts of depression since college, Matorin says. But after she had a baby, it became severe. She stopped eating and sleeping. She began to think about suicide. Finally, the woman made a desperate call to her mother, Matorin says.
"She was very emotional, very tearful, not making sense," Matorin says. "She says, 'I just can't take it anymore. I don't know how to feed the child.' The mother could hear the infant crying in the background."
The family called 911, and the woman arrived at the hospital with a police escort. Matorin says she evaluated the woman and put her on antidepressants. Then came the hard part, Matorin says. She knew the drugs might help the woman eventually. But they weren't going to do anything about her suicidal thoughts during the next few critical days. So Matorin did the only thing she could for her patient. She admitted her to the hospital's locked inpatient unit. I ask to see the facility, so McMurray-Horton takes me there.
Read the rest of the article here
There is also a nine minute audio segment.
This could be a major milestone for how mental illness is treated as we come to understand how NMDA and other receptors play into our mental state instead of the hyperfocus on the serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine systems.
After reading the article...I'm slightly disappointed in NPR. Posting opinion on a placebo trial, where we don't know if the patient received ketamine or the placebo? That's poor scientific journalism.
Also, ketamine is long known to disrupt the normal activity of submembers of the 5-HT (serotonin) receptor family and inhibit serotonin uptake in vivo. This interaction could explain why ketamine has pharmacological effects on something that is related to the serotonin activity in the brain.
Most anti depressants fall under the SSRI category ( Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors). These meds allow for the body to hold onto the serotonin that it naturally makes. Ketamine also messes with serotonin reuptake, however it's on an aesthetic level, not a binding level. This is why it's only used in the most SEVERE cases of Bipolar or Depression. Also note that during administration of Ketamine, it is crucial to maintain the current SSRI regimen because Ketamine isn't a permanent fix.
More thoughts later, when I'm not sleep typing
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