A course of ketamine has helped relieve pain in patients with chronic migraines that have not responded to other treatments.
According to WHO, 3% of the world's population suffers from chronic headaches. In every 100th patient, seizures do not go away for days, and it can be difficult or impossible to relieve pain with known analgesics. There are case reports where small doses of ketamine have been shown to significantly alleviate the suffering of patients with chronic migraine, but no clinical studies have been conducted so far. The first study on this topic was conducted in 2017 by the staff of the hospital. Thomas Jefferson at the University of Philadelphia.
The study involved 61 men. Each of them suffered from severe and prolonged episodes of chronic migraine that did not respond to other therapies. Volunteers received ketamine intravenously for 3–7 days. By the end of the course, three-quarters of the patients noted that the pain was completely gone or became less acute: before the start of the course, patients rated pain at 7.5 points on a ten-point scale, at the end - an average of 3.4 points. The results of the study were presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Anesthesiologists in Boston.
The experimenters were interested in the short-term effects of ketamine, but there is reason to believe that after a course of ketamine, the pain may recede for a long time; This hypothesis is yet to be tested by scientists.
In recent years, there has been a growing interest among Western physicians in drugs - promising drugs for CNS disorders, but difficult to obtain or little studied due to their popularity as recreational drugs. Ketamine is one of them; in large doses, it causes severe hallucinations and loss of control over the movements of the body, in even larger doses it plunges you into a deep sleep. Previous studies have shown that ketamine can prevent the development of post-traumatic stress disorder and is also effective as an antidepressant.
Kiev center Expio is the first and only medical institution providing ketamine therapy in Ukraine.