Click play to listen to this entire episode (which covers the book The Language of God, stem cells, and a funny science sketch)
Mignon: A very interesting article was just published about antidepressant research in the Archives of General Psychiatry. Dr. Carlos A. Zarate Jr. and his colleagues at the National Institute of Mental Health found that a single intravenous infusion of a drug known as ketamine may relieve symptoms of depression within two hours and remain effective for up to one week. Ketamine is typically used as an intravenous anesthetic for animals, although it is also used illegally as a club drug, where is is snorted and called Special K.
This research on the use of ketamine as an antidepressant is important because in this study ketamine acted very quickly and most currently available medications don't start to relieve symptoms for several weeks, and during this lag period, patients with severe depression can be at risk for suicide.
Currently available antidepressants take so long to act because most of them work by increasing the levels of the reward-system neurotransmitters serotonin or dopamine over time, whereas ketamine acts quickly on a different neurotransmitter called gluatmate, which is usually thought of as being involved in learning and memory, but has also been implicated in depression.
Science Magazine's ScienceNow web site wrote up an article about the study, and in this clip their managing editor Erik Stokstad describes the trial, and the importance of the findings.
Stokstad: What they did in this study was took 17 patients who had major depression and they had really not responded to up to 6 medications -- they hadn't gotten any kind of relief from them -- so they took these 17 people and gave them an intravenous infusions of a placebo or ketamine, at a much lower dose than club drug users take them. What they found was really pretty amazing: 71% of the patients responded to the treatment, almost 30% responded in a way that their depression really was in remission -- and it acted fast.
So they saw a statically significant response less than 2 hours after the drug was infused.
That's really quite remarkable.
Natasha Pinol: Do you think we'll see ketamine as a drug?
Stokstad: Probably not . It has hallucinogenic side effects but it's offering clues that might lead to a new type of faster-acting antidepressant.
Mignon: Erik Stokstad's comments were generously provided by the Science Magazine podcast which is available at www.sciencemag.org.
Do you have a question for - Absolute Science -? Email us at absolutescience@welltopia.com and you might just get a shout out and
an answer on the air.
