Three weekly infusions of ketamine (0.8 mg/kg) helped people with severe alcohol use disorder stay abstinent more days over six months than placebo infusions did. The ketamine group averaged 10.1% more days abstinent than the placebo group. Combining ketamine with mindfulness-based relapse prevention therapy produced the largest improvement, with 15.9% more abstinent days compared with placebo plus alcohol education. No serious adverse events occurred. Relapse rates did not differ significantly between ketamine and placebo groups. The findings suggest ketamine is safe and may support abstinence, especially when paired with psychological therapy.
Inhaling nitrous oxide (N2O) impairs verbal memory recall, especially when sentences are low in semantic context. Among 44 male U.S. Navy corpsmen aged 20–29, those who breathed N2O for 10 minutes made more errors repeating sentences than those who breathed air. Task complexity caused the most errors. Volunteers could partly compensate for variations in syntax and the gas state, but low semantic quality strongly hurt performance. The combination of N2O, low syntax, and low semantic context produced the highest error rate, while air, high syntax, and high semantic context produced the lowest.