Examining the Psychotomimetic Properties of Ketamine using Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging

Abstract

Ketamine is a non-selective glutamate N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor (NMDA) antagonist used at high doses as an anesthetic and at subanesthetic doses as a rapid-acting antidepressant (Bera et al., 2025; Cabrera Abreu et al., 2025). At subanesthetic doses, ketamine transiently increases both positive and, to a lesser extent, negative symptoms in healthy people (Beck et al., 2020) and worsens positive symptoms in people with psychotic disorders, during the acute effects (Lahti, 1995; Lahti et al., 2001). Some have also argued that it has the potential to model the full range of psychotic symptoms more than other psychotomimetic drugs (Corlett et al., 2007), such as serotonergic psychedelics or dopaminergic stimulant substances (Carhart-Harris et al., 2013; Krystal et al., 2005). This project will examine the potential overlap and distinctions of neural alterations between the acute effects of ketamine in a healthy population (Kaldewaij et al., 2024) and patients with psychotic disorders (PD) (Salamone et al., 2025).

Topics & conditions

Detected automatically by Psychedelic Commons from the title and abstract, not labels from the source. They may be incomplete.

Keywords