Ketamine – More mechanisms of action than just NMDA blockade

Summary Ketamine has been in clinical use for over half a century, yet its precise mechanisms of action remain mysterious for the large part. Its hypnotic effects appear to be largely mediated by blockade of NMDA and HCN1 receptors, but cholinergic, aminergic, and opioid systems appear to play both a positive and negative modulatory role in both sedation and analgesia. Ketamine's effects in chronic pain, and as an antidepressant, far outlast the actual drug levels, and are probably mediated by a secondary increase in structural synaptic connectivity that is mediated by a neuronal response to the ketamine-induced hyper-glutamatergic state.

• Publication year

  2014

• Venue

  Trends in Anaesthesia and Critical Care

• Publication date

  2014-06-01

• Fields of study

  Medicine

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1016/J.TACC.2014.03.002
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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