Glutamate: Understanding the Master Neurotransmitter and Its Effect on Your Mood

If you have depression or anxiety, there’s a good chance you’ve at least heard of serotonin, a common neurotransmitter chemical that plays a key role in mood regulation. But there’s also a good chance you haven’t heard of an even more abundant neurotransmitter called glutamate.

In fact, glutamate is the most common neurotransmitter in the brain, assisting not only with regulating mood, but also with cognition and memory. 

In your brain, glutamate stimulates or excites nerves, making them more receptive to neural messages and promoting normal nerve signaling. When glutamate levels are low, nerve signaling slows and the risk of emotional health issues, like depression or anxiety, increases.

At Revival Infusion Madison, Sarah Wilczewski, CRNA, APNP, offers ketamine infusions to promote optimal glutamate activity. In this post, she offers a quick overview of glutamate, the “master” neurotransmitter.

Neurotransmitter basics

Neurotransmitters are special chemicals whose sole purpose is to optimize the signals or communication pathways between nerves. The human body contains more than 100 unique types of neurotransmitters that can be further divided into different categories — excitatory, inhibitory, or modulatory — based on their actions and how they affect nerve activity.

Glutamate is an excitatory neurotransmitter. These neurotransmitters work by activating or “exciting” nerve receptors, helping electrical signals pass from one nerve to another. 

Neurotransmitters are widely used throughout your body, supporting critical functions and activities like breathing, heartbeat, thinking, mood, and muscle movement. It’s not surprising, then, that having low levels or high levels of even one neurotransmitter can have wide-ranging effects on your health.

Glutamate and emotional health

Glutamate is called the master neurotransmitter because it’s so abundant and because it plays so many important functions in your body’s nervous system. In addition to supporting cognitive functions, like memory and thinking, glutamate is essential for regulating mood and behavior. 

Specifically, glutamate plays a role in neuroplasticity, the manner in which the brain reacts and adapts to environmental stimuli or other changes. Being able to “change course” when confronted with disruptive experiences, including stress, is important for maintaining resilience against negative emotional experiences like anxiety and depression.

But the relationship between stress and glutamate is bidirectional — not only can glutamate affect how we respond to stress, but stress can alter glutamate production, expression, and activity. By dysregulating glutamate function in the brain, chronic stress can lead to ongoing symptoms of depression and anxiety, potentially contributing to other emotional disorders, like post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and schizophrenia.

Ketamine for glutamate regulation

While lifestyle changes like a healthy diet, regular exercise, and stress management may help regulate glutamate holistically, most people need additional help. That’s where ketamine infusion comes in.

Treatment-resistant depression

Ketamine has been shown to be especially effective in helping people with depression and anxiety symptoms that don’t respond to traditional medications, like antidepressants. Unlike most medications that focus on the neurotransmitter serotonin, ketamine targets glutamate.

Neuroplasticity

Specifically, ketamine temporarily blocks receptors involved in glutamate activity, promoting new nerve connections and supporting enhanced neuroplasticity. Combined, these effects improve the way your brain adapts and responds to stress, potentially reducing symptoms of depression and anxiety.

More benefits

Ketamine also increases production of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), a protein that plays an important role in depression and other mood disorders. Infusions also help reduce neuroinflammatory effects that alter glutamate production and function.

Fight treatment-resistant depression with ketamine

Because antidepressant medications primarily target serotonin, they’re not always effective in helping people manage their symptoms. By targeting a more common neurotransmitter — glutamate — ketamine infusions offer dramatic and long-lasting symptom relief for a better quality of life.

To learn more about ketamine infusions and how they can help you, call 608-405-6824 or book an appointment online with the team at Revival Infusion Madison in Fitchburg, Wisconsin, today.