• Posted November 7, 2024

Ketamine ODs Like the One That Killed Matthew Perry Are Rare But Increasing

After "Friends" star Matthew Perry was found dead in his home jacuzzi just over a year ago, an autopsy later pinpointed the main cause of death as an acute ketamine overdose.

The coroner's report determined that high blood levels of ketamine, an anesthetic with hallucinogenic effects, caused Perry to lose consciousness and then drown. He was 54.

Now, new data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows Perry's case joins a small but growing list of hundreds of Americans who have lost their lives to ketamine.

Researchers looked at numbers for July 2019 through June 2023 from a national database on drug overdoses. It included information from death certificates and coroner's reports from 44 states and the District of Columbia.

The study found that ketamine was implicated in only a small minority of fatal drug overdoses -- less than 1%.

But case numbers are creeping upwards, from 0.3% to 0.5% over the study period, said a team led by Alana Vivolo-Kantor. She's associate director for science at the CDC's Division of Overdose Prevention.

Even those seemingly small percentages represent a lot of lost lives: Over the study period, 912 people died of a fatal overdose in which ketamine was detected, and 440 died in cases where ketamine was thought to be a direct contributor to death.

In 24 cases, ketamine overdose was the sole cause of death.

Still, "almost all overdose deaths involved other substances," such as various forms of fentanyl (about 59% of cases), methamphetamine or cocaine, the research team reported.

Ketamine-linked fatal overdoses disproportionately affected the young, with more than a third of those dying being between the ages of 25 and 34.

White males made up about three-quarters of ketamine overdose victims, the report found.

The research team says more must be done to monitor and better understand the dangers posed by ketamine, which can "cause respiratory, cardiovascular and neuropsychiatric adverse events."

The findings were published Nov. 7 in the CDC journal Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.

More information

Find out more about the dangers of ketamine use at the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

SOURCE: Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, Nov. 7, 2024