Ketamine administration reduces limbic reactivity during emotional stimulation: An fMRI study in healthy subjects

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