Party drug ketamine may help treat depression

Ketamine, a party drug, may help treat patients with severe depression who don't respond to other treatments, researchers from the University of Oxford found.

On the streets, illicit users abuse ketamine, a "club drug," for its hallucinogenic properties, but it is also used for radiation and burn therapy, reports the Center for Substance Abuse Research. Now, a team out of the United Kingdom has discovered that ketamine may help those with treatment-resistant depression.

About 29 percent of severely depressed patients benefitted from ketamine for up to three weeks, and 15 percent did not relapse for more than two months, their findings showed.

One in 10 people suffer from depression at some point in their lifetime, but lead researcher Dr. Rupert McShane estimates that 180,000 people suffer from incurable moderate or severe depression.

McShane and his colleagues conducted a small trial on 28 people, reported in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, and gave them three or six small doses of ketamine over a 40-minute period for three weeks.

Ketamine alleviated depression symptoms in eight participants, and half of them improved so much they were no longer considered depressed. Some patients responded to the ketamine treatment within the first six hours despite the fact that some had been dealing with depression for over 20 years.

"It really is dramatic for some people, it's the sort of thing really that makes it worth doing psychiatry, it's a really wonderful thing to see," McShane, a consultant psychiatrist at Oxford Health and researcher in Oxford University's department of psychiatry, said, according to BBC News.

Despite the drug's initial positive results, researchers note that some patients relapsed within a matter of days, while others who continued to take ketamine doses benefitted for about three months. The side effects, meanwhile, are serious, including the possibility of blocking blood flow to the brain.

"It's a controversial area but there's no doubt that it's got potential," McShane remarked, according to The Guardian.