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Comment & Response
January 2015

Ketamine for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder—Reply

Author Affiliations
  • 1Department of Psychiatry, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, New York
  • 2Fishberg Department of Neuroscience, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, New York
  • 3Friedman Brain Institute, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, New York
JAMA Psychiatry. 2015;72(1):95-96. doi:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2014.1751

In Reply In his correspondence referencing our published proof-of-concept randomized clinical trial of intravenous ketamine for chronic posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD)1 and another study published by our research group,2 Dr Rasmussen remarks that our comparison drug, midazolam, also had some beneficial effects on PTSD symptom levels. He also noted that the beneficial effects of both ketamine and midazolam might be explained by a placebo effect. Furthermore, Dr Rasmussen stated that if the extent of dissociative effects of ketamine were found to be related to its mitigating effects on PTSD symptoms, it may be concluded that the reduction in PTSD symptom levels associated with ketamine is due to “patient expectation of benefit, that is, that ketamine is a better placebo than midazolam.”

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