• Matti Gärtner, Sabine Aust, Malek Bajbouj, Yan Fan, Katja Wingenfeld, Christian Otte, Isabella Heuser-Collier, Heinz Böker, Josef Hättenschwiler, Erich Seifritz, Simone Grimm, and Milan Scheidegger.
• Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Campus Benjamin Franklin, Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Hindenburgdamm 30, 12203 Berlin, Germany; MSB - Medical School Berlin, Calandrellistraße 1-9, 12247 Berlin, Germany. Electronic address: matti.gaertner@charite.de.
• Eur Neuropsychopharmacol. 2019 Apr 1; 29 (4): 501-508.

AbstractConverging evidence suggests that a single sub-anesthetic dose of ketamine can produce strong and rapid antidepressant effects in patients that do not respond to standard treatment. Despite a considerable amount of research investigating ketamine's mechanisms of action, the exact neuronal targets conveying the antidepressant effects have not been identified yet. Preclinical studies suggest that molecular changes induced by ketamine bring forward large-scale network reconfigurations that might relate to ketamine's antidepressant properties. In this prospective two-site study we measured resting state fMRI in 24 depressed patients prior to, and 24 h after a single sub-anesthetic dose of ketamine. We analyzed functional connectivity (FC) at baseline and after ketamine and focused our analysis on baseline FC and FC changes directly linked to symptom reduction in order to identify neuronal targets that predict individual clinical responses to ketamine. Our results show that FC increases after ketamine between right lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) and subgenual anterior cingulate cortex (sgACC) are positively linked to treatment response. Furthermore, low baseline FC between these regions predicts treatment outcome. We conclude that PFC-sgACC connectivity may represent a promising biomarker with both predictive and explanatory power.Copyright © 2019 Elsevier B.V. and ECNP. All rights reserved.

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