How ketamine keeps depression at bay
New Delhi, Jun 26 (ANI): According to recent research, ketamine can lift a person out of a deep depression within minutes of its administration, unlike most antidepressant medications. Researchers, led by Mark Rasenick, University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine, describe the molecular mechanisms behind ketamine's ability to squash depression and keep it at bay. The effects of ketamine typically lasted about a week, much longer than would be expected with ketamine's six-hour half-life in the body. Researchers performed an experiment with ketamine and noticed that the G proteins left the rafts much faster. G proteins began migrating out of the lipid rafts within 15 minutes. And the long-lasting effects of ketamine may be due to the fact that the G proteins were very slow to move back into the lipid rafts. The new finding contradicts the long-held idea that ketamine works solely by blocking a cellular receptor called the NMDA receptor, which sits on the surface of nerve cells and helps transmit signals. In fact, when the researchers knocked out the NMDA receptor, ketamine still had the same effect on the cells quickly moving G proteins out of lipid rafts on the cell membrane. The study appears in the journal Molecular Psychiatry.
