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This article misses the second part of the study, as elucidated by Derek Lowe here http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2016/05/06/it-isnt-ketamine htt
by tshtf 10y ago
This article misses the second part of the study, as elucidated by Derek Lowe here http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2016/05/06/it-isnt-ketamine http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2016/05/06/it-...:
In a rather elegant experiment, the authors deuterated ketamine at the methylene next to its carbonyl group, and showed that this compound (as expected) displayed the same NMDA activity as the parent compound – but that it was far slower at producing the metabolite, and had no activity in the antidepressant screens.
- simonster 10y agoThe "antidepressant screens" referred to here are in mice, not humans. The Nature paper is an amazing set of experiments that provide very compelling evidence that (2R,6R)-HNK is responsible for the antidepressant effects of ketamine in mouse models of depression, but Neuroskeptic is right that it's not clear that (2R,6R)-HNK is also responsible for the antidepressant effects of ketamine in humans. We know that mouse models of depression are not necessarily great; SSRIs seem to be more effective in mouse models than they are in humans.
- zcarter 10y agoPer Neuroskeptic's due diligence, human effects don't look promising. >>> This is a citation to one of their own papers, from 2012. There’s just one problem – as far as I can see that paper didn’t find the correlation that Zanos et al. say it did.