https://nordot.app/1129826373202330104
https://news.yahoo.com/ketamine-hit-gym-depression-treatments-172637614.html
Getting to the bottom of what causes depression – and doing something about it – has long been a challenge for doctors, social workers and psychiatrists, not to mention the patients’ families.
Scientists in Ireland and the US have come up with two separate studies suggesting some novel potential treatments: one requiring the patient to take ketamine, a drug perhaps best described as a hallucinogenic anesthetic.
The other proposal – presumably healthier – recommends sweat-inducing, muscle-draining resistance training as a palliative.
A team from the University of Michigan said they have found “more evidence about the power of IV ketamine to help some of the most severely ill people with depression or bipolar disorder who haven’t gotten relief from other treatments – including many who have frequent suicidal thoughts.” Some doctors have in recent years started recommending ketamine be taken to counter depression.
However, the team, whose work was published in Journal of Affective Disorders, found that around 1 in 3 patients did not respond to ketamine, meaning more work is needed to figure out the “major questions” which the researchers said “remain about who ketamine can help, why some people get tremendous relief within days or weeks while others don’t.”
Published by the journal Trends in Molecular Medicine, the second piece of research, by Matthew Herring of University of Limerick and Jacob Meyer of Iowa State University, claimed there is “exciting evidence” showing how resistance exercise training “may be an accessible alternative therapy to improve anxiety and depression like more established therapies, while also improving other important aspects of health.”
More work is needed, the Irish-American researchers said, as the “plausible psychobiological mechanisms, which help us to better understand how and why resistance exercise training may improve these mental health outcomes, are poorly understood.”
Resistance training combines some of the aerobic benefits of circuit-type exercise and the muscle-building and strength-based effects of weights, as it typically entails using rubber bands and ropes that, as the name suggests, resist easy manipulation.
