| This kind of headline made some round in Twitter a while ago and got justifiably ridiculed, so let me repeat those old points here. The study states "agents used for anesthetic maintenance included intravenous propofol and inhaled sevoflurane or isoflurane." All three have some known antidepressant activity: - propofol: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6276046/ (This story was pretty big back then, as propofol's a common electeoconvulsion anesthetic.) - sevoflurane: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8851135/ (tiny sample, but idea comes from other tiny samples where it worked) - isoflurane: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23922809/ Does it mean this study is meaningless? No, but it definitely does not prove what the abstract wants to say. What it does show is well-summarized in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36030251. See replies under https://twitter.com/jonahdavids1/status/1654842991331213313. (And no, having general anesthesia work about as well as ketamine does not make ket useless either. Ket is less likely to stop you from breathing. And you can stay awake, even non-hallucinating [see: nasal sprays], while it works.) |