Translational Psychiatry
March 21, 2021
Jennifer L. Kruse, Megha M. Vasavada, Richard Olmstead et al.
47 citations
Lower baseline levels of the inflammatory marker interleukin-8 (IL-8) in females, but not males, trended toward predicting a better response to ketamine for depression. In 46 depressed patients receiving a single ketamine infusion, changes in IL-8 over time also differed by sex and treatment response: increasing IL-8 was associated with decreasing depression scores in females, while the opposite pattern appeared in males. Other inflammatory markers showed no significant relationships. These preliminary findings suggest that sex differences in IL-8 may help explain how ketamine works and could guide personalized depression treatment.
medRxiv Preprint Server
December 1, 2023
Brandon Taraku, Joana R. Loureiro, Ashish K. Sahib et al.
1 citation
preprint
In major depressive disorder, ketamine infusions alter brain connectivity in networks involving the habenula and nucleus accumbens, regions central to reward processing. After four subanesthetic ketamine infusions given to 58 adults with depression, resting-state fMRI scans showed specific changes in static and dynamic functional connectivity between these regions and visual, parietal, and cerebellar areas. Decreased variability in connectivity between the left habenula and right precuneus and visual cortex, and between the right nucleus accumbens and right visual cortex, correlated with reduced depression severity. Reduced connectivity between the left habenula and visual/parietal cortices, and increased connectivity between the left nucleus accumbens and visual/parietal cortices, correlated with improvements in anhedonia. Ketamine appears to modulate overlapping habenula and nucleus accumbens functional pathways related to therapeutic response.
medRxiv
July 29, 2025
Artemis Zavaliangos‐petropulu, Ginny Ghang, Toni Boltz et al.
preprint
Treatment-resistant depression affects 30-50% of people with major depressive disorder. Electroconvulsive therapy and ketamine can relieve it, but how they work is unclear. This transcriptome analysis of peripheral blood from 37 people receiving electroconvulsive therapy, 60 receiving ketamine, and 35 non-depressed controls found no longitudinal changes in gene expression for either treatment after correcting for multiple comparisons. In the ketamine group, one gene (IGKV1-9) differed between remitters and non-remitters at baseline. In the electroconvulsive therapy group, six co-regulated gene modules differed at baseline between patients and controls. Pre-treatment gene expression differences may have predictive value, but larger studies are needed.