Each month our editorial team sifts through hundreds of papers and curates notable findings—for practitioners and informed readers who want to stay current with the evidence. Subscribe to the monthly Research Digest for expert analysis and concise summaries of key papers.
In a small, carefully controlled study, seven people with major depression each received a single low-dose ketamine infusion on one day and a saline infusion on another day, without anyone knowing which was which. People who got ketamine showed clear improvement in their depressive symptoms within three days, while those…
Adjunctive ketamine demonstrated a greater reduction in clinically significant suicidal ideation in depressed patients within 24 hours compared with midazolam, partially independently of antidepressant effect.
This systematic review looked at studies of ketamine for people whose depression did not respond to usual treatments (treatment-resistant depression, TRD). Across 24 papers with 416 patients, most studies found that ketamine can reduce depressive symptoms quickly — often within hours — and it was also reported to lower suicidal…
This small open-label study tested 25 people with treatment-resistant major depression who each received one intravenous ketamine infusion (0.5 mg/kg over 40 minutes). The researchers found that people who showed an antidepressant response at 24 hours had worse thinking skills before treatment, especially slower processing speed. Ketamine caused short-term problems…
The authors reviewed 31 studies (from a search of 304 articles published 1949–Feb 2013) of adults with depression plus measured anxiety. They report that SSRIs, SNRIs, and TCAs often reduce symptoms in this “anxious depression” group, but these patients are less likely to keep their improvement or reach lasting remission…
In a randomized, double-blind trial, people with treatment-resistant depression received subcutaneous ketamine twice a week for 4 weeks. When doses were flexible and could be increased (0.5–0.9 mg/kg), anxiety scores fell more with ketamine than with the active control; this was not seen with a fixed low dose (0.5 mg/kg).…
