Welcome to Helix Talk, an educational podcast for healthcare students and providers covering real-life clinical pearls, professional pharmacy topics, and drug therapy discussions.

This podcast is provided by pharmacists and faculty members at Rosal Franklin University College of Pharmacy.

This podcast contains general information for educational purposes only. This is not professional

advice and should not be used in lieu of obtaining advice from a qualified health care provider.

And now on to the show.

Welcome to Helix Talk episode 96. I'm your co-host, Dr. Keene. I'm Dr. Schumann. And I'm Dr.

Patel. And this week, I'm excited to bring to you Helix Talk episode 96, abracadabra, spravado.

Is Es ketamine a new magic cure for depression?

It sounds like today we're talking about a new drug that sounds like a ketamine derivative to me, Dr. Sch. Yeah, so what we're going to talk about is the recent FDA approval of Esketamine brand name Spirvado for Management of Treatment and Resistant Depression as an add-on

to oral antidepressant therapy. So it's a novel agent in its mechanism of action and in its

dosage form and even a little bit too in terms of its adverse event profile in the logistics

of an administration. So there's a lot to cover the history of it,

what it looks like, and maybe, you know, is this a really as big of a deal as it seems to be?

So I'm really intrigued to learn what eschatamine is. However, let's talk about what ketamine is, because it sounds a lot like that. So we know it was a, it's an NMDA antagonized that was approved as an anesthetic

Asian back in the days. But then we saw a lot of it use in veterinary medicine. And then obviously

some drug of abuse type of uses as well, known as Special K or Cat Valium. And mainly the use

there was for its halisogenic effects.

Right. So things like loss of awareness of time and space, depersonalization,

de-realization, vivid dreams, flashbacks as adverse effects. People talk about it's falling into

the K-hole. So it doesn't sound like one of those things that could be a good thing, but it

does have a lot of uses. Dr. Kane, I'm imagining you've seen this every now and then as an

anesthetic agent. For sure. So we use ketamine fairly commonly. It's becoming more common in the

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