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Title    Laughing Gas Relieves Symptoms in People With Treatment-Resistant Depression
Date    Tuesday June 15 2021, @10:04PM
Author    martyb
Topic   
from the Jumpin'-Jack-Flash? dept.
https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=21/06/15/1749210

upstart writes:

Laughing gas relieves symptoms in people with treatment-resistant depression:

A single, one-hour treatment that involves breathing in a mixture of oxygen and nitrous oxide — otherwise known as laughing gas — significantly improved symptoms in people with treatment-resistant depression, according to new data from researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the University of Chicago.

[...] "A large percentage of patients don't respond to standard antidepressant therapies — the patients in this study had failed an average of 4.5 antidepressant trials — and it's very important to find therapies to help these patients," said Charles R. Conway, MD, a professor of psychiatry at Washington University and one of the study's senior investigators. "That we saw rapid improvements in many such patients in the study suggests nitrous oxide may help people with really severe, resistant depression."

[...] The primary conclusions in this study were that nitrous oxide — both at 25% and in a 50-50 mixture with oxygen — improved depression in 17 of those study participants. The differences between a 25% mix and a 50% mix mainly involved how long the antidepressant effects lasted. Whereas the 50% dosage had greater antidepressant effects two weeks after treatment, the 25% dose was associated with fewer adverse events, the most common of which was feeling nauseated.

"Some patients experience side effects — it's a small subset, but it's very real — and the main one is that some people get nauseated," Conway said. "But in our study, only when people got the 50% dose did they experience nausea. When they received 25% nitrous oxide, no one developed nausea. And that lower dose was just about as effective as the higher dose at relieving depression."

Of the 20 people who completed all of the study's treatments and follow-up exams, 55% (11 of 20) experienced a significant improvement in at least half of their depressive symptoms, and 40% (eight of 20) were considered to be in remission — meaning they no longer were clinically depressed — after breathing a nitrous oxide solution for one hour.

Journal Reference:
Peter Nagele, Ben J. Palanca, Britt Gott, et al. A phase 2 trial of inhaled nitrous oxide for treatment-resistant major depression [$], Science Translational Medicine (DOI: 10.1126/scitranslmed.abe1376)


Original Submission

Links

  1. "upstart" - https://soylentnews.org/~upstart/
  2. "Laughing gas relieves symptoms in people with treatment-resistant depression" - https://medicine.wustl.edu/news/laughing-gas-relieves-symptoms-in-people-with-treatment-resistant-depression/
  3. "Charles R. Conway, MD" - https://physicians.wustl.edu/people/charles-r-conway-md/
  4. "10.1126/scitranslmed.abe1376" - https://doi.org/10.1126/scitranslmed.abe1376
  5. "Original Submission" - https://soylentnews.org/submit.pl?op=viewsub&subid=49190

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