Journal of Palliative Care & Medicine
Open Access

Research Article

Neurocognitive Changes after Sustained Ketamine Administration in Children with Chronic Pain

Amy Lee Bredlau^1*, Brian T Harel², Michael P McDermott³, Robert H Dworkin⁴, David N Korones⁵, James G Dolan⁶ and Heather R Adam⁷

¹Department of Pediatrics, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York, USA

²Cog State, Inc. Yale University School of Medicine, Child Study Center, New Haven, USA

³Department of Biostatistics and Computational Biology, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York, USA

⁴Departments of Anesthesiology and Neurology, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York, USA

⁵Departments of Pediatrics and Palliative Care, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York, USA

⁶Department of Public Health Sciences, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York, USA

⁷Department of Neurology Rochester, University of Rochester, New York, USA

*Corresponding Author:

Amy-Lee Bredlau
Medical University of South Carolina
135 Rutledge Avenue, MSC 558 Charleston
South Carolina, USA-29425
Tel: 843-876-2872
Fax: 843-792-8912
E-mail: bredlau@musc.edu

Received date: January 28, 2015; Accepted date: March 11, 2015; Published date: March 27, 2015

Citation: Bredlau AL, Harel BT, McDermott MP, Dworkin RH, Korones DN, et al. (2015) Neurocognitive Changes after Sustained Ketamine Administration in Children with Chronic Pain. J Palliat Care Med 5:215. doi: 10.4172/2165-7386.1000215

Copyright: © 2015, Bredlau AL, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Introduction: Ketamine has received attention recently as an agent for chronic pain. There are concerns, however, regarding the neurocognitive changes patients might experience after ketamine exposure. Methods: This prospective, uncontrolled study describes the neurocognitive functioning of 11 children with chronic pain before and after 2 weeks of daily oral ketamine exposure. Neurocognitive assessment was performed at baseline, Week 2, and Week 14. We hypothesized that there would be declines in neurocognitive scores at either Week 2 or Week 14. Results: No decline in neurocognitive function was detected in the children investigated. Mean scores for tests measuring executive function and memory were improved at Weeks 2 and 14 compared to baseline. Discussion: This study did not detect any decline in neurocognitive scores in a small number of children exposed to 2 weeks of oral ketamine therapy. Randomized, controlled studies of the neurocognitive effects of ketamine in children are recommended to further investigate these preliminary findings.

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