Author: Jon Hamilton / Source: NPR.org
The anesthetic ketamine can relieve depression in hours and keep it at bay for a week or more.
Now scientists have found hints about how ketamine works in the brain.
In mice, the drug appears to quickly improve the functioning of certain brain circuits involved in mood, an international team reported Thursday in the journal Science. Then, hours later, it begins to restore faulty connections between cells in these circuits.
The finding comes after the Food and Drug Administration approved Spravato in March, a nasal spray that is the first antidepressant based on ketamine.
The anesthetic version of ketamine has already been used to treat thousands of people with depression. But scientists have known relatively little about how ketamine and similar drugs affect brain circuits.
The study offers “a substantial breakthrough” in scientists’ understanding, says Anna Beyeler, a neuroscientist at INSERM, the French equivalent of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, who wasn’t involved in the research. But there are still many remaining questions, she says.
Previous research has found evidence that ketamine was creating new synapses, the connections between brain cells. But the new study appears to add important details about how and when these new synapses affect brain circuits, says Ronald Duman, a professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at Yale University.
Studying ketamine’s antidepressant effects in mice presented a challenge. “There’s probably no such thing as a depressed mouse,” says Dr. Conor Liston, a neuroscientist and psychiatrist at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York and an author of the Science paper.
So Liston and a team of scientists from the U.S. and Japan gave mice a stress hormone that caused them to act depressed. For example, the animals lost…
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