New Insight Into the Mechanisms of Fast-Acting Antidepressants: What We Learn From Scopolamine

For a depressed patient, a single day without symptom improvement means yet another day of suffering. The currently available antidepressants require weeks or months to achieve appreciable symptom remission and remain ineffective in a large number of patients. Severely depressed patients are at high risk of suicide, making delayed symptom improvement a life-threatening unresolved problem in psychiatry. Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop new strategies to treat depression more rapidly and more effectively to achieve fast and sustained symptom relief.
Source: Biological Psychiatry - Category: Psychiatry Authors: Tags: Early Career Investigator Commentary Source Type: research