Madeline Brendle – AFPE Fellowship Recipient
Madeline Brendle is a third-year Ph.D. student at the Department of Pharmacotherapy at the University of Utah College of Pharmacy. The ASHP-AFPE fellowship will fund her dissertation work titled “Real world evaluation of the effectiveness, safety, cost of care, and barriers/motivations for adoption of esketamine and ketamine as pharmacotherapies for mental health conditions.” Ketamine is a dissociative anesthetic traditionally used as an anesthetic and analgesic agent. However, at sub anesthetic-doses, ketamine has been observed to have dissociative/hallucinatory effects that have led to rapid and significant improvements in depression and other mental health conditions. While racemic ketamine is only prescribed for psychiatric disorders as an off-label indication, esketamine nasal spray (SpravatoTM) was developed as a rapid-acting treatment for TRD and major depressive disorder (MDD) with acute suicidal ideation.
Esketamine and ketamine are fundamentally changing how researchers and clinicians study and treat psychiatric disorders with their novel mechanism of action for depression pharmacotherapy and rapid reduction of depressive symptoms as early as 24 hours post-administration of the medication. By conducting this important work, researchers, clinicians, and patients can better understand the long-term and real-world benefits, risks, affordability, and accessibility of esketamine and ketamine treatment for mental health conditions.
