Spotlight: Personality profiles and trauma history in ketamine therapy for mood and anxiety disorders: A latent profile analysis of short-term outcomes (Gregoire, et al, 2025)
"Personality traits relate to baseline mental health severity but not short-term response to ketamine. Trauma history may predict greater benefit from treatment."
Spotlight: Changing your mind: neuroplastic mechanisms underlying the therapeutic effect of psychedelics in depression, PTSD, and addiction (Palhas, et al, 2025)
"Serotonergic psychedelics & ketamine appear to share common cellular mechanisms. They both recruit glutamatergic neurons to stimulate BDNF-trKB signaling, promoting synaptogenesis via the mTOR pathway. These changes may explain their efficacy in depression, anxiety, PTSD, & addiction."
Spotlight: Modulation of functional network co-activation pattern dynamics following ketamine treatment in major depression (Taraku, et al, 2025)
"findings suggest ketamine modulates brain network dynamics which may normalize dynamic patterns seen in TRD at baseline toward patterns seen in controls. Changes in Salience Network state dynamics may correspond to improvements in ruminative symptoms following ketamine therapy."
Spotlight: Oral ketamine for the treatment of major depressive and bipolar disorder, a randomized controlled trial and meta-analysis (Silberbauer, et al, 2025)
Treatment was well-tolerated, with no serious adverse events reported...in a total of 592 patients, meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials on oral ketamine treatment demonstrated its antidepressant efficacy with a Number Needed to Treat = 4.89 for response and a NNT = 9.16 for remission.
Spotlight: Antidepressants and the endogenous opioid system (Fricker, et al, 2025)
"A growing body of evidence links the opioid system w/ major depressive disorder... two different widely used antidepressants, tianeptine & ketamine, both interact with MOR; tianeptine as a full agonist, ketamine as a positive allosteric modulator. Both produce antidepressant effects within days."
Spotlight: Real-world clinical data on the long-term effectiveness and safety of generic racemic ketamine treatment (Massaneda-Tuneu, et al, 2025)
"Findings suggested that racemic ketamine (including by mouth), when appropriately dosed and administered within a structured clinical and safety monitoring framework, is both effective, safe and well-tolerated over a 6-month treatment period."
