• Chronic Pain
  • Contact
  • Depression
  • Home
  • Privacy Policy
  • PTSD
  • Terms and Conditions
  • Video
Sunday, May 18, 2025
  • Login
Ketamine News
Advertisement
  • Home
  • Depression
    ketamine news

    Bronner’s Magic Soaps Becomes The First Company to Offer Ketamine-Assisted Therapy as Part of Employees’ Health Benefits

    ketamine news

    Popular Soap Company–Dr. Bronner’s– Plans To Explore The Psychedelic Space

    ketamine news

    Psychedelic and Plant Medicine Decriminalization Efforts Spread to the Midwest.

    ketamine news

    What There is to Know About Ketamine vs. Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT)

    ketamine news

    Dispelling the Stigmas, Ketamine, and the Future of Mental Healthcare

    ketamine news

    A First of its Kind: Wellbeing Digital Sciences Delivers its “First Ketamine Treatment Under the Inpatient KITE Program”

    ketamine news

    Aggregate Study on the Efficacy of Ketamine to Treat Depression Shows Promising Results.

    Flow Integrative - Christi Myers

    Provider Spotlight – Christi Myers, Flow Integrative

    How To Help A Depressed Person

    How To Help A Depressed Person

  • Chronic Pain
    ER Doctor Aims for Patient Centered Breakthrough: A Ketamine That Works Orally

    ER Doctor Aims for Patient Centered Breakthrough: A Ketamine That Works Orally

    Ketamine: A Paradigm Shift in Pain Management

    Ketamine: A Paradigm Shift in Pain Management

    ketamine treatment for depression

    Amidst An Opioid Crisis, Ketamine Has the Potential To Save Lives

    Ketamine for pain

    Multi-Day Low Dose Ketamine Infusion For The Treatment Of Complex Regional Pain Syndrome

    ketamine for chronic pain

    End Chronic Back Pain with Ketamine for a Fuller Life

    ketamine for pain

    What You Should Know About Rheumatoid Arthritis

    ketamine for pain

    Myofascial Pain Syndrome: Symptoms, Causes, and Treatment

    ketamine for pain

    A sweet reprieve: Ketamine helps to relive phantom limb pain

  • PTSD
    ketamine news

    Dispelling the Stigmas, Ketamine, and the Future of Mental Healthcare

    ketamine news

    A First of its Kind: Wellbeing Digital Sciences Delivers its “First Ketamine Treatment Under the Inpatient KITE Program”

    veterans day

    Veterans’ Day: What Does PTSD Look Like In Veterans?

    PTSD awareness month

    PTSD Awareness Month: What Can I Do To Help?

    Trump Orders ‘a lot’ of Ketamine for Depressed Veterans

    Will Ketamine Be A Breakthrough Drug for PTSD?

    Ketamine to treat ptsd

    PTSD Sufferers ‘Healed’ With New Ketamine Infusion Therapy?

    ketamine to treat PTSD

    VA Uses Ketamine To Treat PTSD Effectively

    ketamine to treat ptsd

    Ketamine can help treat PTSD

  • Video
  • Ketamine Directory
  • Ketamine Media
  • Contact
No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Depression
    ketamine news

    Bronner’s Magic Soaps Becomes The First Company to Offer Ketamine-Assisted Therapy as Part of Employees’ Health Benefits

    ketamine news

    Popular Soap Company–Dr. Bronner’s– Plans To Explore The Psychedelic Space

    ketamine news

    Psychedelic and Plant Medicine Decriminalization Efforts Spread to the Midwest.

    ketamine news

    What There is to Know About Ketamine vs. Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT)

    ketamine news

    Dispelling the Stigmas, Ketamine, and the Future of Mental Healthcare

    ketamine news

    A First of its Kind: Wellbeing Digital Sciences Delivers its “First Ketamine Treatment Under the Inpatient KITE Program”

    ketamine news

    Aggregate Study on the Efficacy of Ketamine to Treat Depression Shows Promising Results.

    Flow Integrative - Christi Myers

    Provider Spotlight – Christi Myers, Flow Integrative

    How To Help A Depressed Person

    How To Help A Depressed Person

  • Chronic Pain
    ER Doctor Aims for Patient Centered Breakthrough: A Ketamine That Works Orally

    ER Doctor Aims for Patient Centered Breakthrough: A Ketamine That Works Orally

    Ketamine: A Paradigm Shift in Pain Management

    Ketamine: A Paradigm Shift in Pain Management

    ketamine treatment for depression

    Amidst An Opioid Crisis, Ketamine Has the Potential To Save Lives

    Ketamine for pain

    Multi-Day Low Dose Ketamine Infusion For The Treatment Of Complex Regional Pain Syndrome

    ketamine for chronic pain

    End Chronic Back Pain with Ketamine for a Fuller Life

    ketamine for pain

    What You Should Know About Rheumatoid Arthritis

    ketamine for pain

    Myofascial Pain Syndrome: Symptoms, Causes, and Treatment

    ketamine for pain

    A sweet reprieve: Ketamine helps to relive phantom limb pain

  • PTSD
    ketamine news

    Dispelling the Stigmas, Ketamine, and the Future of Mental Healthcare

    ketamine news

    A First of its Kind: Wellbeing Digital Sciences Delivers its “First Ketamine Treatment Under the Inpatient KITE Program”

    veterans day

    Veterans’ Day: What Does PTSD Look Like In Veterans?

    PTSD awareness month

    PTSD Awareness Month: What Can I Do To Help?

    Trump Orders ‘a lot’ of Ketamine for Depressed Veterans

    Will Ketamine Be A Breakthrough Drug for PTSD?

    Ketamine to treat ptsd

    PTSD Sufferers ‘Healed’ With New Ketamine Infusion Therapy?

    ketamine to treat PTSD

    VA Uses Ketamine To Treat PTSD Effectively

    ketamine to treat ptsd

    Ketamine can help treat PTSD

  • Video
  • Ketamine Directory
  • Ketamine Media
  • Contact
No Result
View All Result
Ketamine News
Home Featured

How does ketamine work as an antidepressant?

Ketamine News by Ketamine News
June 22, 2020
in Featured, Ketamine for Depression
0
Ketamine for depression

Image Courtesy of Shutterstock

0
SHARES
304
VIEWS
Share on FacebookShare on Twitter

A small study hints at how ketamine interacts with serotonin.

The anesthetic ketamine shows promise as a rapid treatment for difficult-to-treat depression, but scientists don’t know exactly how it works.

Now, a small study hints that, among other effects, ketamine may activate a specific receptor in the brain that interacts with serotonin, a brain chemical implicated in many mood disorders. One caveat: The study included just 30 individuals.

Experts told Live Science that the study would have to include more than 100 people, if not several hundred people, to draw firm conclusions about where serotonin fits in the complex chain reaction triggered by ketamine in the brain. “Unfortunately, you don’t get a really clear answer with really small studies,” said Dr. Gerard Sanacora, director of the Yale Depression Research Program, who was not involved in the research.

That said, the study, published June 1 in the journal Translational Psychiatry, was “well designed” and offers interesting questions for future investigation, Sanacora added. By clarifying how and whether the antidepressant effects of ketamine depend on serotonin, for instance, scientists could develop new medications that behave similarly to ketamine but minimize the risks of the “dirty,” and potentially addictive, drug.

The case for serotonin

Once known for its legal use as an anesthetic in hospitals and its illicit use as a club drug called “Special K,” ketamine has gained traction in recent decades as a new way to treat depression.

In people whose depression does not improve with standard treatments, such as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), an infusion of ketamine could potentially improve their symptoms within hours or days, Live Science previously reported. SSRIs can take weeks or longer to take full effect, by comparison, and that’s only when they work. While exciting, the fast-acting nature of ketamine has yet to be explained.

Studies indicate that ketamine blocks receptors for glutamate, a brain chemical that plays roles in mood regulation and generally works by exciting brain cells, pushing them to send electrical signals. “I call it the ‘juice of the brain’ — it’s a stimulating neurotransmitter” that helps direct activity throughout the brain, said Dr. Alan Schatzberg, a professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine, who was not involved in the study.

In addition to glutamate receptors, ketamine may also interact with opioid receptors, either directly or indirectly, Schatzberg added. In a 2018 report published in The American Journal of Psychiatry, Schatzberg found that the beneficial effects of ketamine disappear in patients given naltrexone, a drug that blocks opioid receptors. While he said he suspects that opioid activity may be critical to how ketamine works as an antidepressant, opiates alone “might not explain” all the nuanced effects of the drug.

“Ketamine has a broad mechanism of action — it does a lot of things,” said lead author Dr. Mikael Tiger, a psychiatrist and researcher in the Department of Clinical Neuroscience at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden. Given that existing antidepressants tend to amplify serotonin levels in the brain, Tiger and his co-authors aimed to see whether ketamine does something similar.

(Very) early findings

In mouse models of depression, the antidepressant-like effects of ketamine can be blocked by drugs that drive down serotonin levels in the animals, the authors noted in their report. Mice in a depression-like state spend more time hiding rather than exploring their enclosures, become immobile in stressful situations rather than struggling, and show less interest in rewards compared to other mice, among other symptoms. Ketamine’s antidepressant-like effects can be restored with drugs that activate a specific serotonin receptor, known as serotonin 1B.

In people with depression, less binding occurs at 1B receptors than is seen in healthy individuals, namely within regions of the brain where reward processing and mood regulation take place, according to previous work by Tiger and others. The decrease in binding most likely stems from a decrease in the overall number of 1B receptors, the authors noted.

One study in monkeys, published in the journal Translational Psychiatry, hinted that ketamine might reverse this decline in 1B binding, thus restoring 1B activity to healthy levels; but similar research had not been conducted in humans. Until now.

Tiger and his co-authors split 30 volunteers with difficult-to-treat depression into two groups: one group received ketamine and the other took a placebo. Neither the patients nor doctors knew which substance each person received, but because ketamine causes mind-altering dissociative effects, everyone in the ketamine group “realized that they received active treatment,” the authors noted. That said, “a surprisingly large” portion of the placebo group thought that they had also received ketamine, so it’s unlikely that issues with “blinding” affected the results, they wrote.

Before and after treatment, all the participants completed questionnaires about their depressive symptoms and received a positron emission tomography (PET) scan, in which small amounts of radioactive material are introduced into the body and imaged with a special camera. By choosing a radioactive tracer that latches onto 1B receptors, the authors could assess whether the number of receptors changed in response to ketamine.

“PET … is the best method to quantify a certain protein in the living human brain,” including different types of receptors, Tiger told Live Science.

The authors expected that ketamine would boost 1B binding across several regions of the brain, but overall, binding did not dramatically differ between the two groups. Again, binding is thought to reflect the number of available 1B receptors. But when the authors analyzed specific brain regions, they found that, compared with the placebo, the ketamine group showed a higher number of available 1B receptors in the hippocampus, a hub of emotional processing also involved in learning and memory.

Increased binding in another region, called the ventral striatum, correlated with improved symptoms in the ketamine group, although the total instances of binding only differed slightly from the placebo group. Those in the ketamine group who had the fewest 1B receptors in this region, at baseline, showed the greatest improvement in symptoms.

A complicated picture

While the finding “wasn’t incredibly strong,” statistically, it does corroborate earlier studies that the serotonin 1B receptor plays some role in depression and may respond to ketamine treatment, Schatzberg told Live Science. “There’s something there with serotonin, but it’s a bit elusive,” and the same goes for conventional antidepressants that alter serotonin levels, he said.

Once activated, the 1B receptor sets off a chain reaction that increases dopamine levels in the reward system, an effect that could theoretically ease symptoms of depression, Tiger said. This potential mechanism could be investigated in larger studies, he said. “With these things, it all comes down to sample size,” Sanacora told Live Science.

Even the small study serves as a fertile ground for future research, though, which could help scientists design drugs that behave like ketamine, but without the potential risks, Sanacora added.

Ketamine can temporarily strain the cardiovascular system, and the dissociative effects can disturb people, so patients receiving the treatment require close monitoring. Moreover, ketamine poses a high risk for drug abuse, depending on the dose and route of administration, and the way it interacts with the opiate system underscores the need for caution, Sanacora said.

In developing a safe alternative, scientists will need to understand how ketamine works with the brain “as a whole,” as the antidepressant effect likely arises from several sources, he said.

Original article: https://www.livescience.com/ketamine-as-an-antidepressant-serotonin.html

Tags: FeaturedKetamine for depressionKetamine in the News
Previous Post

Combining therapy with the psychedelic drug psilocybin results in large reductions in anxiety and depression

Next Post

Cannabis And Ketamine: Is There A Risk Of Interaction?

Next Post
With more research on the horizon, those suffering with severe depression may find reprieve in ketamine and cannabis.

Cannabis And Ketamine: Is There A Risk Of Interaction?

Browse by Category

  • A Day in the Life
  • Esketamine
  • Featured
  • Ketamine Dictionary
  • Ketamine for Anxiety
  • Ketamine for Depression
  • Ketamine for Pain
  • Ketamine for PTSD
  • Ketamine in The News
  • Ketamine Treatment
  • Mental Health
  • Psychedelic Medicine
  • Suicide Prevention
  • Uncategorized
ketamine news
Privacy Policy | Terms and Conditions

Categories

  • A Day in the Life
  • Esketamine
  • Featured
  • Ketamine Dictionary
  • Ketamine for Anxiety
  • Ketamine for Depression
  • Ketamine for Pain
  • Ketamine for PTSD
  • Ketamine in The News
  • Ketamine Treatment
  • Mental Health
  • Psychedelic Medicine
  • Suicide Prevention
  • Uncategorized

Recent Posts

  • Ketamine Decoded: New Study Sheds Light on Its Powerful Brain and Mood Effects
  • Capturing the Ketamine Experience in Real Time: A First-of-its-Kind Academic Paper from Denovo Therapy
  • A Group of D.C. Advocacy Groups Have Joined Hands to Push For Drug Policy Reform in the Nation’s Capital
  • Connecticut Approves a Bill That Could Pave Way for the Use of Psychedelic Substances to Treat Mental Health Illnesses
  • ‘Magic Mushrooms’ Look Set to Follow in the Footsteps of Cannabis
  • Chronic Pain
  • Contact
  • Depression
  • Home
  • Privacy Policy
  • PTSD
  • Terms and Conditions
  • Video

© 2025 Ketamine News

Welcome Back!

Login to your account below

Forgotten Password?

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Log In
No Result
View All Result
  • Home
  • Depression
  • Chronic Pain
  • PTSD
  • Video
  • Ketamine Directory
  • Ketamine Media
  • Contact

© 2025 Ketamine News