Ketamine rebuilds connections between neurons lost during stress

So is this the generic $3-a-dose stuff or the new technologically improved eskatamine at $600 a dose? I mean that stuff has to be…like…at least a ten times better, right?

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In the 90’s a bindle was at least 10 bucks… no idea on the math to convert a bindle to a dose to the prescribed pharmaceutical costs.

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If anyone tried the DOI link it should have linked to


(Science screwed it up, not Chemical and Engineering news)

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Its also used as a common sedative for veternary surgery (and when vets put down an animal, they use a ketamine overdose)

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Never in my wildest days of being a 90s Raver would I have imagined this being a legitimate drug for anything uh, productive. What a time to be alive !

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Be very very careful when interpreting mouse studies. For starters, what exactly is “depression” in a mouse? They chemically induced stress in mice, and called it depression. It is a fascinating finding, but exactly what it means is yet to be seen. An awful lot of mouse models just don’t generalize very well.

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Or alcohol and coffee! :smiley:

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Isn’t coming to know them the whole point? :wink:

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How soon until we can get ketamine gummies on the BB Store?

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At least one POTUS administration, possibly as many as four. Sadly, I don’t know if the odds of Tinyhands leaving office willingly exceed those of something rather dire he cooks up to sieze… With great reluctance, believe him… Emergency powers to wield as needs be to solve this crisis… And the next one… And the ones after that…

“off the shelf” ketamine is a 50/50 mix of the two stereoisomers. The stuff being tested as a nasal spray for depression-not-responsive-to-other-drugs is just one isomer (the S isomer, hence the name eSketamine). No one has yet proven that it works better, or worse, or the same (or at all?)…

For comparison purposes, prilosec and nexium (brand names) are also racemates, marketed and priced differently, but… for the omperazole/esomeprazole discussion, there’s been debate about effectiveness at equal doses. All the studies that say to use the more expensive one have been done with a greater dose of the more expensive one. This NIH review (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4647708/ )has a great discussion of not just these two drugs, but why stereoisomers In general may (or may not)make better medications than their racemates.

simplified: it comes down to whether the part of the molecule that is causing the effect you choose is based on the part of the molecule that is different in the racemates. If it is, then the drug is stereoselective, and choosing a mixture that favors one isomer over the other could be worth it. If not, not.

Now, how to guess whether the effects of ketamine are stereoselective???

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Or if you’re doing animal research.

Way more pleasant to work with than isofluorane

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Do they? Weird. The LD50 is huge.

I would add a link to this commentary about how esketamine nasal spray didn’t actually perform all that well in clinical trials, and the FDA had to bend its rules a tad to approve it, and it may be because of either the method or the stereoisomer or something else entirely that is the reason. Also, the number of obstacles they required to actually administer it seems ridiculous to me.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/11/ketamine-now-by-prescription/

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I have a suspicion that a not-so-small part of the rational was to try to quash off label usage of generic ketamine for the same thing, and a huge part was PROFIT! The price of the isomer is exponentially greater.

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It’s very obvious that the driver was money and not safety or anything else. I really hope this just drives interest in using ketamine and making it less of a taboo substance.

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For euthanasia its mixed with valium. Not sure how much ketamine exactly, but its a lot

Yeah, that’d do it.

It’s the viscous busybodies I worry about.

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Yuck, that is a visual I didn’t need! :grimacing:
(I struggled with that word in a Katie Porter comment. She is vicious, not so sure about whether she is viscous.)

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