For a few years, there's been a new drug on everybody's lips when it comes to depression treatment: ketamine. Ketamine is used both as an anesthetic and as a hallucinogenic drug, but has held promise as a potential therapy for treatment-resistant depression — only, scientists haven't been able to figure out why. But new research has shed new light on how ketamine affects your brain to help bust depression. And that's great news for depression sufferers, because the more we understand ketamine, the more we can test its wider use.
In 2014, Oxford scientists tested ketamine on 28 people whose depression had totally refused to lift despite every conventional treatment on the books — therapy, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs) and everything else currently legalized for treating depression. The results were seriously promising: 30 percent of the patients felt a considerable lift in their symptoms that lasted at least a couple of weeks.
Read more: https://www.bustle.com/p/how-does-ketamine-affect-the-brain-new-research-is-shedding-light-on-why-the-drug-is-helpful-for-depression-8271375