Antidepressant Compound, a Metabolite of Ketamine, Located That May Come With Zero Side Effects
Adam Rifkin stashed this in Medicine
Stashed in: Awesome, Depression, Depression
This sounds promising:
Ketamine is known to be able to reverse the symptoms of depression very quickly. It has been shown to treat depression without a matter of hours. Most antidepressant medications take a number of weeks or months for results to be reached. Sadly, the drug comes with many major side effects, such as hallucinations or even dissociation. Thankfully, researchers recently discovered a metabolite of ketamine that has successfully reversed depression within mice, with zero side effects.
Todd Gould, a researcher at the Department of Psychiatry within the University of Maryland’s School of Medicine says this new information has the potential of becoming a major breakthrough that may offer the fast help of ketamine to sufferers of depression without all the risks. Most depression medications increase neurochemical levels in the brain. Most commonly, SSRIs are used but these drugs are only helpful to about half the patients they are prescribed to. Moreover, when the drugs do work properly, they do not take effect for up to two months. Ketamine does not work by increasing serotonin or norepinephrine levels, and offers help within just a few hours following first treatment.
Published in Nature magazine:
http://nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature17998.html
10:33 PM May 29 2016