The Role of Ketamine in Depression
Carolina Digital Repository (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) August 16, 2019 Peer reviewed DOI: 10.17615/m7nw-fg52 via OpenAlex
Summary
Ketamine infusions may provide short-term relief for patients with refractory depression, including reducing suicidal thoughts. The review focuses on clinical trials of ketamine's effectiveness in alleviating depressive symptoms and discusses its benefits, limitations, and future potential as a treatment option. Treatment-resistant depression occurs when patients do not respond to two or more standard medication therapies.
Study at a glance
| Design | review |
|---|---|
| Population | patients with refractory depression |
| Key finding | Ketamine infusions may help alleviate depressive symptoms, including suicidal ideation, in patients with refractory depression. |
Abstract
Background: Introduction: The average person has up to 15% lifetime risk for developing depression. Major depressive disorder symptoms can include a depressed mood, such as feeling sad or having more anger than normal, changes in appetite, loss of interest in activities or hobbies, psychomotor agitation or retardation, loss of energy, feelings of worthlessness or guilt, decreased ability to think or concentrate, sleep disturbance, an/or having suicidal thoughts. To make the diagnosis of major depressive disorder, according to the DSM-V, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental disorders, a person must have at least 5 or more of these 9 symptoms during a continuous two-week period which causes significant impairment in functioning. Depression is treated in a variety of ways including medications and psychotherapy either as monotherapy or in tandem. When a patient has failed 2 or more medication treatments they are considered treatment resistant or as having refractory depression. Treatment resistant depression or refractory depression has several standard therapies, which include combination pharmacotherapy, electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT, transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS, vagal nerves stimulation and deep brain stimulation. Current research does support that a novel therapy, such as ketamine infusions, may help patients in the short-term with their depressive symptoms, including suicidal ideation. The focus of this paper is to review the clinical trials involving ketamine use in refractory depression for the alleviation of depressive symptoms, including suicidal ideation, and to examine the benefits, limitations, and future potential for ketamine as a treatment for refractory depression.