Cashing In On 'Special K' Party Drug: Could Ketamine Become New Treatment For Depression?

Conventional anti-depressants can take weeks or months to work properly. For patients dealing with bouts of manic depression or the flashback of a horrific event, these drugs alone might not be enough.

Researchers at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City are researching Ketamine, otherwise known as "Special K" in the party scene, in the hopes of treating depression.

Previous studies have examined how certain psychedelics could potentially aid severe mental health problems, some suggesting that MDMA, psilocybin and other related substances in controlled clinical settings under close medical supervision could be used to treat depression, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), cases of bipolar disorder, etc.

Pharmaceutical companies are working to create a patentable version of the drug as researchers work to learn more about how it affects the brain. The drug works by blocking the signaling molecule NMDA that's a component of glutamate pathway, involving both memory and cognition.

According to psychiatrist James Murrough at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, many were unaware that this pathway was even involved in depression until ketamine was more thoroughly studied.

"It blew the doors off what we thought we knew about depression treatment," Murrough said, via Nature magazine.

Murrough and a team of researchers published the largest trial of off-label ketamine carried out in 2013, via a nasal spray that contained a structural variant called esketamine. 

Though the study only involved 73 participants, the results revealed that 64 percent of the depressed individuals saw a reduction in their condition in just about 24-hours when they took an off-label ketamine. (Unlike traditional depressants, Ketamine can take just 2 hours to start working.) 

A separate study released by a company called Naturex in Evanston, Il., just last month looked at 386 depressed individuals who showed a 50 percent success rate when taking the ketamine-like drug, GLYX-13, with relatively no hallucinatory side-effects.

Roche of Basel, Switzerland, is also expected to release results early this year from a 357-person trial of a drug called decoglurant, which targets the glutamate pathway.

Before the drug is widely used, more long-term studies are necessary. However, researchers are hopeful that it could one day treat more severe cases of mental illness.

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