ketamine
Racemic Ketamine vs Esketamine in Treatment-Resistant Depression: The Overlooked Role of Arketamine (Tan, et al, 2025)
Evidence suggests that "IV racemic ketamine is more effective than IN esketamine in TRD; convergent preclinical and clinical findings support the hypothesis that arketamine plays a key role in this superiority and that ketamine’s antidepressant mechanisms extend beyond simple NMDAR antagonism."
ketamine
Spotlight: A long, strange trip: Ketamine treatment in psychiatry (Nutt, et al, 2025)
"...mystical experiences were strongly related to immediate and sustained psychiatric benefits at the group level and on an individual, session-by-session basis across the six doses, providing mechanistic support for ketamine-psychotherapy pairings."
ketamine
Spotlight: Rapid-acting NMDA and GABAergic Modulators in Mood Disorders: From Synaptic Mechanisms to Clinical Practice (Serretti, 2025)
"Depression is increasingly conceptualized as a disorder of impaired synaptic plasticity and excitation-inhibition imbalance within corticolimbic circuits. Ketamine, brexanolone, zuranolone, offer complementary approaches to restore circuit function."
ketamine
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."
ketamine
Spotlight: Intermittent ketamine and neuromodulation treatment evoke synergistic antidepressant-relevant action (Brown, et al, 2025)
"The rapid response that can be observed following ketamine treatment has reconceptualized how pharmacotherapy can treat depression. One subanesthetic infusion can alleviate symptoms within hours; however, sustained relief also requires multiple doses. "
ketamine
Spotlight: Efficacy and safety of ketamine maintenance therapy in treatment-resistant depression: A systematic review of treatment protocols and clinical outcomes (Al-Garni, et al, 2025)
"Concurrent psychotherapy improved treatment maintenance. Adverse events were generally mild to moderate... Ketamine maintenance therapy shows promise as a treatment option for TRD, with regular dosing schedules and early intervention associated with optimal outcomes."
ketamine
Spotlight: Ketamine Assisted Therapy Outcomes for First-Responders with Comorbid Mental Health Diagnoses (Tsang, et al, 2025)
"KAT may provide meaningful benefits beyond symptom reduction."
opiod system
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."
at home ketamine
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."
ketamine
Spotlight: Synaptic priming: A framework for pharmacotherapy in depression (Brown, et al, 2025)
"we describe how the indirect relationship between ketamine's pharmacokinetics and sustained antidepressant pharmacodynamics reveals a dosing model (primer pharmacology) that can be harnessed to fine-tune therapeutic outcomes."
ketamine
Ketamine Sustains and Enhances the Protective Effects of a Ketogenic Diet Against Relapses in an Anorexia Mouse Model (Dong, et al, 2025)
"Ketamine sustains and boosts Ketogenic Diet benefits for > 10 days, supporting clinical findings that short-term KGD + KET may be an effective treatment for preventing anorexia nervosa relapses."
at home ketamine
Spotlight: Ketamine Harm Reduction
Prevention & Treatment in Ketamine Use Disorder - When a medicine becomes a poison
ketamine
Spotlight: Ketamine for treatment-resistant post-traumatic stress disorder: double-blind active-controlled randomised crossover study (Beaglehole, et al, 2025)
"We provide preliminary support for the efficacy and tolerability of i.m. ketamine in a community sample of individuals with PTSD."
iv ketamine
Spotlight: Efficacy of Intravenous Racemic Ketamine on Global Severity and Individual Symptoms of Depression: An Exploratory Retrospective Analysis (Landrum, et al, 2025)
" Maintenance intravenous racemic ketamine therapy demonstrated significant, persistent, and broad efficacy for treatment-resistant depression ...Side effect burden was no greater in higher doses as compared with lower. "
ketamine
Spotlight: Ketamine's Role in Neuroinflammation and Neuroprotection Across Neurological and Psychiatric Disorders: A Narrative Review (Silva, et al, 2025)
"Our findings indicate that ketamine reduces excitotoxicity and inflammation, which may contribute to neuroprotection in acute neurological injuries. These insights underscore ketamine's potential as an adjunctive neuroprotective agent, warranting further clinical investigation...
iv ketamine
Spotlight: First study to compare two ketamine therapies for patients with severe depression
IV ketamine found to offer faster response with greater improvements than FDA-approved intranasal esketamine (Spravato)
ketamine
Characteristics of Ongoing Clinical Trials of Psychogenic Substances for Psychiatric Disorders (Havlik, et al, 2025)
"The most frequently studied substances were psilocybin (n=64; 35.4%) and ketamine (n=61; 33.7%). Trials were notably concentrated within a small number of leading academic institutions."
ketamine
Spotlight: Comparative Effects of Repeated Ketamine Infusion Versus Intranasal Esketamine in Patients With Treatment-Resistant Depression: A Retrospective Chart Review (Meisner, et al, 2025)
"In this naturalistic sample of patients with similarly severe TRD treated in a ketamine subspecialty service over a 4–5-week induction period, treatment with IV racemic ketamine was associated with a more rapid response and greater overall efficacy than treatment with IN esketamine."
