Guest Interview with Ben Malcolm, PharmD, MPH

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Footnotes:

—Yes I will acknowledge that I mispronounced “anecdotal” a few times during this interview. For some reason this is always one of those tricky words for me to say, and even past Presidents and Presidential candidates have mispronounced words from time to time. If you want to roast me for it (politely) feel free to leave a comment.

—For reference to the article that Ben Malcolm mentioned in the interview about Ketamine being non-inferior to Electro-Convulsive Therapy (ECT), please see the following article:

Anand A, et al. Ketamine vs ECT for Non-Psychotic Treatment Resistant Major Depression. NEJM. 2023; 388: 2315-2325. https://www.nejm.org/doi/10.1056/NEJMoa2302399

In summary: This study analyzed 405 patients aged 21 to 75 years old with treatment resistant major depression, and randomized patients to either ketamine or ECT. Patients received 0.5 mg/kg twice a week or ECT three times a week over a three week treatment period, and found a response rate of 55% for ketamine vs 41% for ECT. As ECT has often been considered the “gold standard” for resistant depression, this was a major finding. We did not cover this on our previous Ketamine episode but you can listen here for review of this episode.