Dr. Gerald Sanacora, Professor of Psychiatry and Director of Yale Depression Research at Yale School of Medicine, explains that when it comes to depression and bipolar medications, there are some serious limitations.
Although in the short term, it seems like many people are doing better with current medications, as time goes on, these same people start showing signs of relapse.
In order to find medications that will produce a smaller percentage of relapses, there has been a surge of new research that greater reflects the pathophysiology of depression and bipolar disorder. Pathophysiology involves understanding the physiological processes that cause a certain condition to develop.
Currently, Dr. Sanacora is exploring how stress affects the brain and the glutamatergic neurotransmitter system. By understanding the changes that stress can cause, new types of antidepressants can start being developed to target these effects.
Dr. Sanacora believes that the NMDA receptor is a target for new pharmaceutical development to be used as an antagonist to produce antidepressant effects. A specific kind of this receptor that is used to study this phenomenon is ketamine. Ketamine has antidepressant effects, which is helpful to people with depression and bipolar disorder.
Although ketamine has many positive effects, it also acts as an anesthetic and can impact blood pressure, heart rate, cognition, and other vital functions. Because of these side effects, other NMDA receptors are being investigated as targets for new medications.
Hopefully, the population will start seeing some of these new medications soon. For more information, check out the full interview and article at this website.