Treatment Resistant Depression (Pilot)

Summary

Treatment resistant depression (TRD) is a major public health problem. Current therapeutic options for this patient population remain limited. With all available treatments, only a sub-set of those patients who achieve an antidepressant response are likely to achieve treatment-induced remission. The need for antidepressant medication that can provide both rapid and long lasting relief of TRD symptoms is widely recognized. There is new evidence that drugs that block NMDA glutamate receptors (NMDA antagonists) are promising candidates for meeting this need. Existing studies in TRD have used only a low-dose, brief infusion of ketamine that would not be expected to re-sensitize the NMDA receptor; in agreement with this theory, these prior studies have found only temporary improvements of depression. Our key hypothesis is that a higher-dose, longer-term ketamine infusion, such as that used in chronic pain studies, would provide a more robust and lasting improvement from depression. Accordingly, we will test whether a 100-hour ketamine infusion would be more effective than the standard 40-minute ketamine infusion currently used in other TRD studies. We will randomize subjects to one of 2 arms: (1) 100-hour (+/- 4 hours) ketamine infusion plus clonidine for the entire infusion (2) 40-minute ketamine infusion (plus clonidine) following a 100+/- hour saline infusion. All subjects will receive clonidine, an alpha-2 agonist, to minimize side effects of ketamine (namely, brief/mild psychotic and cognitive symptoms).

Timeline

Start

2012-04

Primary completion

2014-06-06

Completion

2015-06-05

Publications

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• Siegel JS, Palanca BJA, Ances BM, Kharasch ED, Schweiger JA, Yingling MD, Snyder AZ, Nicol GE, Lenze EJ, Farber NB. Prolonged ketamine infusion modulates limbic connectivity and induces sustained remission of treatment-resistant depression. Psychopharmacology (Berl). 2021 Apr;238(4):1157-1169. doi: 10.1007/s00213-021-05762-6. Epub 2021 Jan 22.
• Lenze EJ, Farber NB, Kharasch E, Schweiger J, Yingling M, Olney J, Newcomer JW. Ninety-six hour ketamine infusion with co-administered clonidine for treatment-resistant depression: A pilot randomised controlled trial. World J Biol Psychiatry. 2016 Apr;17(3):230-8. doi: 10.3109/15622975.2016.1142607. Epub 2016 Feb 26.

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Indications