Efficacy of Repeated Ketamine Infusions for Treatment-resistant Depression

Summary

About one-third of depressed patients will not get better after multiple antidepressant treatments. This situation put a high burden on patients with depression due to worsening quality of life and increasing health care costs. Difficult-to-treat depression might be even worse among Veterans given that the frequency of depressive symptoms is 2 to 5 times higher than among the general US population. A breakthrough discovery happened in recent years when investigators found that one infusion from an old anesthetic named ketamine showed high efficacy and rapid antidepressant effect (sometimes within hours) but lasted only up to a week. The investigators propose to study if multiple infusions of ketamine can provide greater and longer antidepressant effects than one infusion. If that is the case, multiple infusions could be an alternative to relieve depressive symptoms that do not response to multiple antidepressant drugs.

Timeline

Start

2015-04-01

Primary completion

2018-10-22

Completion

2019-03-19

Outcome

Missed primary endpoint

paper For the primary outcome measure, there was no significant difference in change of MADRS scores PMID 32591498 ↗

Publications

• Results Shiroma PR, Thuras P, Wels J, Albott CS, Erbes C, Tye S, Lim KO. Neurocognitive performance of repeated versus single intravenous subanesthetic ketamine in treatment resistant depression. J Affect Disord. 2020 Dec 1;277:470-477. doi: 10.1016/j.jad.2020.08.058. Epub 2020 Aug 26.
• Results Shiroma PR, Thuras P, Wels J, Albott CS, Erbes C, Tye S, Lim KO. A randomized, double-blind, active placebo-controlled study of efficacy, safety, and durability of repeated vs single subanesthetic ketamine for treatment-resistant depression. Transl Psychiatry. 2020 Jun 26;10(1):206. doi: 10.1038/s41398-020-00897-0.

Drugs

Indications

No indication recorded.