health education

Ketamine will be a cure for depression as Yale researchers tries to develop an effective and safer form of the drug.

Researchers, Ronald Duman, a professor of psychiatry and pharmacology at Yale, and George Aghajanian, professor of pharmacology, initiated the study innovating to develop a faster, more effective and more efficient drug in the treatment of psychological disorders such as depression. The journal Science will publish the result of the study on Friday.

Leading brands of antidepressants in the market are Zoloft and Prozac, both are selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, that will take effect in weeks upon administration. As with the development of ketamine, researchers expected that the therapeutic effect of the drug would occur immediately and should last up to 10 days.

Duman explained that the development of a fast-effecting drug such as ketamine is equally economically and medically necessary. Furthermore, he claimed that about 70% of patients who are non-responsive to other drug, showed therapeutic reaction to ketamine use. This proved more efficacy of the drug compared with other marketed drugs.

Experts considered ketamine as NMDA receptor antagonist. The drug can have an effect such as dissociative anesthesia, characterized by a state of high, hallucination, sensory deprivation, and dream-like trance. Medical field uses the drug for its anesthetic effects. Practically, anesthesiologists combined the drug with other drugs in inducing sleep state before a surgery.

Many other researchers had published other researches about the usage of ketamine. Russian doctor Evgeny Krupitsky encouraged the use of the drug incorporation with other method of therapies in the treatment of alcohol addiction. Furthermore, other researchers followed the drug in the treatment of patients experiencing severe pain.

Then after many years, researchers had noticed the potential therapeutic effect of drug as an antidepressant. However, though the drug possessed such high potency, it also puts on equally high side effects. These lead the team of researchers to pursue the invention of a safer form of the drug. They said that they founded the study to reach the goal of transforming the drug into a more convenient pill.