Implementation of a ketamine programme for treatment-resistant depression in the public health system: Lessons from the first Australian public hospital clinic.

One could argue that we are living through a period of innovation and change in psychiatry unlike that seen before, with repurposed medications emerging as novel treatments. However, despite evidence of enhanced clinical outcomes and potential medium-term savings, delivering these promising interventions is resource-intensive and perceived as difficult in the public sector. Consequently, they are generally only available in the private sector, often at great cost, effectively making them inaccessible to the 'Have Nots'.

Evaluating the attitudes of mental health professionals towards trials of MDMA: a randomised vignette trial.

Objectives: To compare attitudes of mental health (MH) professionals towards trials of methylenedioxymethamphetamine-assisted psychotherapy (MDMA-AP), with a neutrally labelled pharmacotherapy trial.

Design: A randomised controlled vignette study design, with experimenters blinded to group condition.

Setting: Participants were recruited online via professional societies.

Huntington's Disease: Pathogenic Mechanisms and Therapeutic Targets.

Huntington's disease (HD) is a tandem repeat disorder involving neurodegeneration and a complex combination of symptoms. These include psychiatric symptoms, cognitive deficits culminating in dementia, and the movement disorder epitomised by motor signs such as chorea. HD is caused by a CAG repeat expansion encoding an extended tract of the amino acid glutamine in the huntingtin protein.

N-acetylcysteine modulates glutamatergic dysfunction and depressive behavior in Huntington's disease.

Glutamatergic dysfunction has been implicated in the pathogenesis of depressive disorders and Huntington's disease (HD), in which depression is the most common psychiatric symptom. Synaptic glutamate homeostasis is regulated by cystine-dependent glutamate transporters, including GLT-1 and system x In HD, the enzyme regulating cysteine (and subsequently cystine) production, cystathionine-γ-lygase, has recently been shown to be lowered. The aim of the present study was to establish whether cysteine supplementation, using N-acetylcysteine (NAC) could ameliorate glutamate pathology through the cystine-dependent transporters, system x and GLT-1.

Enhancing permanganate chemiluminescence detection for the determination of glutathione and glutathione disulfide in biological matrices.

Acidic potassium permanganate chemiluminescence enables direct post-column detection of glutathione, but its application to assess the redox state of a wider range of biological fluids and tissues is limited by its sensitivity. Herein we show that the simple on-line addition of an aqueous formaldehyde solution not only enhances the sensitivity of the procedure by two orders of magnitude, but also provides a remarkable improvement in the selectivity of the reagent towards thiols such as glutathione (compared to phenols and amino acids that do not possess a thiol group). This enhanced mode of detection was applied to the determination of glutathione and its corresponding disulfide species in homogenised striatum samples taken from both wild type mice and the R6/1 transgenic mouse model of Huntington's disease, at both 8 and 12 weeks of age.