In ketamine-assisted psychotherapy (KAP) we can find different routes of administration. The most common are intravenous and intramuscular, but it can also be administered orally, intranasally, transdermally, rectally, epidurally or intradurally.
When we look at the different methods of administration of a compound, we must take into account some basic concepts like bioavailability and half-life. While bioavailability refers to the proportion of the drug that reaches the circulation in active form, and the speed at which it reaches the circulation, the half-life would be the time it takes for the drug to halve its concentration in the body.
Different routes of administration have different percentages of bioavailability:
- Intramuscular administration has a half-life of 55 minutes, bioavailability of up to 93% and an onset of action of around 30 seconds;
- The bioavailability of nasal administration is approximately 50% with a similar onset of action but a half-life of 10-20 minutes.
- The oral route however has an average peak after 40 minutes, with an elimination half-life of 40 min and a bioavailability of 30%.
At Clínica Synaptica we use intramuscular injection, due to its high percentage of bioavailability and greater ease and comfort of administration than the intravenous route. This is usually a quick injection into the upper outer quadrant of the gluteus, performed by our medical team.
