Abstract #0655

Ketamine Administration Reduces Limbic Reactivity During Emotional Stimulation an FMRI Study in Healthy Subjects

Milan Scheidegger¹, Simone Grimm², Martin Walter³, Heinz Boeker², Peter Boesiger¹, Erich Seifritz², Anke Henning¹

¹Institute for Biomedical Engineering, University and ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland; ²Clinic of Affective Disorders and General Psychiatry, University Hospital of Psychiatry Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland; ³Department of Psychiatry, Otto-von-Guericke University, Magdeburg, Germany

Many neuroimaging findings are compatible with the hypothesis that limbic hyperactivity during evaluation of emotional stimuli, combined with prefrontal hypoactivity, might cause negative emotional biases in patients suffering from major depressive disorder (MDD) and that this imbalance can be reversed by antidepressant drug treatment. Our findings show that in healthy subjects an antidepressant intravenous dose of ketamine reduces limbic reactivity in the amygdalo-hippocampal complex during an emotional processing task, which is in support of the hypothesis that pharmacologically modulating limbic neurocircuits might be an important therapeutic strategy to restore parts of the disrupted neurobehavioural homeostasis in MDD.