Peter Salovey President | Yale University
Peter Salovey President | Yale University
A new study led by researchers at Yale University has shed light on the diverse effects of the anesthetic ketamine on the brain, providing insights into why only 65% of patients respond to therapy with this drug. Published in the journal eLife on April 17, the study utilized functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to analyze the brain responses of individuals to ketamine.
Lead by co-senior author Alan Anticevic, the Glenn H. Greenberg Associate Professor of Psychiatry at Yale, the research team found that ketamine produces a range of different response patterns in the brain, challenging the notion that mental health treatments have uniform effects on all individuals. Anticevic stated, “Collectively, these findings support the possibility for developing individually precise pharmacological biomarkers for treatment selection in psychiatry by using human neuroimaging.”
The study, which involved analyzing fMRI data from 40 healthy individuals who received a placebo followed by a ketamine injection, revealed that ketamine elicited a wide variety of responses in the participants' brains. The researchers noted that ketamine generated more distinct "functional connectivity signatures" compared to other substances like psilocybin and LSD.
Furthermore, the team examined gene expression patterns in the human brain and found a strong alignment between the effects of ketamine and the patterns of interneurons, which regulate excitatory activity in the brain. This correlation suggests a potential future use of gene expression patterns to predict individuals who are most likely to benefit from ketamine therapy.
Co-senior author of the paper, Katrin Preller, a visiting assistant professor of psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine, emphasized the significance of the findings in understanding the varying responses to ketamine treatment.
The study's findings open up new possibilities for personalized treatment approaches in psychiatry, offering hope for more targeted and effective therapies for individuals with mental health conditions.
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