Ketamine may alleviate depression, pain, and adverse effects associated with opioid treatment, and may thus represent an attractive adjunct therapy for pain management, according to a novel population analysis recently published in Scientific Reports.1

Nearly half of all patients with depression taking conventional antidepressants discontinue their treatment prematurely.2 Researchers have sought alternatives to standard antidepressants, for which therapeutic effects are delayed by 2 to 10 weeks.3

Ketamine, an N-methyl-D-aspartate antagonist, was shown to provide acute benefits for treatment-resistant depression, bipolar depression, and major depressive disorder with suicidal ideation, when administered intravenously, however, those studies were conducted on limited samples (20 to 57 participants).4-7

The history of ketamine as an illicit drug favored for its hallucinogenic effects presents ethical obstacles to its use in large clinical trials. Researchers from the University of California San Diego in La Jolla, therefore employed an Inverse-Frequency Analysis approach to investigate whether ketamine, when administered in addition to other therapeutics, has antidepressant properties.