Patients who took ketamine reported depression half as often as patients who took other drugs for pain,
according to an analysis of 8 million reports from the US Food and Drug Administration’s Adverse Event Reporting System (FAERS) database.
“Current FDA-approved treatments for depression fail for millions of people because they don’t work or don’t work fast enough,” said senior author Ruben Abagyan, PhD, professor of pharmacy at the University of California San Diego.
“This study extends small-scale clinical evidence that ketamine can be used to alleviate depression and provides needed solid statistical support for wider clinical applications and possibly larger scale clinical trials.”
Approximately 41,000 people in the FAERS database took ketamine. In addition to having significantly fewer reports of depression, compared with patients who took other drugs for pain, patients who received ketamine had significantly fewer reports of pain and opioid-induced side effects, such as constipation, researchers found.
The analysis also revealed potential antidepressant effects of 3 other drugs approved for other purposes: the nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug diclofenac, the antibiotic minocycline, and Botox, which is used to treat wrinkles as well as migraines and other medical disorders.
Researchers suspect the antidepressant effects of diclofenac and minocycline may be linked with their ability to reduce inflammation. Botox, meanwhile, could potentially reduce depression through its cosmetic effects, they hypothesize.
To test that theory, they are currently looking at FAERS data to gauge whether collagen fillers and other aesthetic treatments offer similar antidepressant effects.
“The approach we used here could be applied to any number of other conditions,” said researcher Tigran Makunts, a pharmacy student, “and may reveal new and important uses for thousands of already approved drugs without large investments in additional clinical trials.”
Researchers published their findings in Scientific Reports.
