Journal club effective for expanding body of knowledge on ketamine, other psych drugs
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Key takeaways:
- Researchers created the International Journal Club to expand the knowledge of ketamine and other drugs prescribed for psychiatric disorders.
- Speakers and attendees highly rated the club’s online format.
MIAMI BEACH, Fla. — Creation of an interactive online journal club was effective in expanding the body of knowledge for ketamine and related compounds prescribed for psychiatric disorders, according to a presenter.
“Our goal was fostering a community around ketamine and related compounds for various psychiatric disorders, and we came up with the idea of a journal club,” Sara Costi, MD, a doctoral fellow in the department of psychology at the University of Oxford, said at the American Society of Clinical Psychopharmacology annual meeting.
Academic clinicians and psychiatric trainees from the University of Oxford targeted a broad range of industry and academic professionals, creating the space independent of industry funding.
Speakers were authors of the most recent peer-reviewed publications accessed from PubMed, with presentations centering on randomized control trials, pre-clinical studies, experimental medicine, human mechanistic trials, and various case studies.
Meetings were held on Zoom and structured as webinars at 5:30 pm GMT on the second and fourth Tuesdays of most months, incorporating recorded presentations, question and answer sessions, then an optional unrecorded session where audience members engaged in informal discussions of presentation topics.
Through surveys issued to speakers and attendees after the first year of meetings, Conti and researchers evaluated the club’s format on its acceptability, influenceability and networkability. Overall ratings for speakers across the three domains were 82%, 65% and 77.7%, respectively, while audience members’ domain ratings were 85.6%, 81% and 100%.
“The community has grown quite a lot since we started it and we’d like to have some long-term outcomes from clinical and research practice of its participants and possibly even compare with other educational interventions,” Costi said.