KETAMINE ANAESTHETIC & PARTY MEDICINE CAN BE USED AS ANTIDEPRESSANT TOO

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Popular party drug ketamine can have powerful beneficial effects on severely depressed patients who have struggled for years to recover. It should hence be developed responsibly as a psychiatric medicine, British experts said on Thursday.In a study published in the Lancet Psychiatry journal, specialists from Oxford University said there is an urgent need for ethical and innovative action by doctors to prescribe the drug under controlled conditions. Ketamine is a licensed medical drug, widely used as an anaesthetic and to relieve pain. But it is also used as a recreational drug — sometimes known as Special K — and can lead some people into addiction and drug abuse.Several research teams around the world have been trilling ketamine use in chronic and recurring depression, since many patients with the psychiatric condition fail to respond to currently available antidepressants such as Prozac and Seroxat.

The US pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson is developing an intranasal form of the drug, called esketamine. Its results so far have been promising enough for Food and Drug Administration officials to award esketamine “breakthrough” status to speed its progress through regulatory hurdles.McShane and his co-researcher Ilina Singh, a psychiatry professor at Oxford University, told the briefing there had been a worrying sharp rise in the past year in the number of private ketamine clinics in the United States. On the street, users often take several grams a day and can suffer severe bladder problems and impaired brain function. The doses used in medical trials are a fraction of that — around 80 milligrams — and given once a week in a monitored setting.ketamine has such great potential to help a small group of very ill patients that it would be wrong not to find a way of allowing them to benefit from it.This drug is available, it’s out there, and if we can help patients get treatment responsibly, it’s our duty to do so by using it in required dose so that refractile depression patient can get benefit.