Repeated ketamine administration redeems the time lag for citalopram's antidepressant-like effects.

Repeated ketamine administration redeems the time lag for citalopram's antidepressant-like effects. Eur Psychiatry. 2015 Mar 17; Authors: Zhang GF, Liu WX, Qiu LL, Guo J, Wang XM, Sun HL, Yang JJ, Zhou ZQ Abstract Current available antidepressants exhibit low remission rate with a long response lag time. Growing evidence has demonstrated acute sub-anesthetic dose of ketamine exerts rapid, robust, and lasting antidepressant effects. However, a long term use of ketamine tends to elicit its adverse reactions. The present study aimed to investigate the antidepressant-like effects of intermittent and consecutive administrations of ketamine on chronic unpredictable mild stress (CUMS) rats, and to determine whether ketamine can redeem the time lag for treatment response of classic antidepressants. The behavioral responses were assessed by the sucrose preference test, forced swimming test, and open field test. In the first stage of experiments, all the four treatment regimens of ketamine (10mg/kg ip, once daily for 3 or 7 consecutive days, or once every 7 or 3 days, in a total 21 days) showed robust antidepressant-like effects, with no significant influence on locomotor activity and stereotype behavior in the CUMS rats. The intermittent administration regimens produced longer antidepressant-like effects than the consecutive administration regimens and the administration every 7 days presented similar antidepressant-like effects with less...
Source: Journal of the Association of European Psychiatrists - Category: Psychiatry Tags: Eur Psychiatry Source Type: research