Sleep-administered ketamine/psychedelics: A streamlined strategy to address two challenges in research on ketamine and psychedelics.
European psychiatry : the journal of the Association of European Psychiatrists February 5, 2025 Shokouh Arjmand, Mats B Lindström, Carl M Sellgren et al. 1 citation
The dissociative effects of ketamine and psychedelics may be linked to their rapid antidepressant properties, but it is unclear whether these effects are necessary for therapeutic action. Because patients can often tell whether they received an active drug or placebo based on the dissociative experience, clinical trial results may be biased. The authors propose a novel approach: administering these drugs to patients during sleep to separate the subjective dissociative experience from the drug's biological effects, potentially allowing for better-controlled studies.