Laughing gas might live up to its name for people struggling with depression, a major new study says.

Treatment with nitrous oxide can provide rapid relief for people with depression, especially those who aren’t helped by antidepressants, researchers reported recently in the journal eBioMedicine.

“This is a significant milestone in understanding the potential of nitrous oxide as an added treatment option for patients with depression who have been failed by current treatments,” senior researcher Dr. Steven Marwaha, an academic psychiatrist with the University of Birmingham in the U.K., said in a news release.

“This population has often lost hope of recovery, making the results of this study particularly exciting,” Marwaha added.

For the study, researchers pooled data from seven previous clinical trials involving 247 people with depression. The studies looked at the use of laughing gas for treating depressive disorders like major depression, treatment-resistant depression and bipolar depression.

Results showed that a single treatment with nitrous oxide provided at a 50% concentration produced rapid and significant reductions in depression symptoms within 24 hours.

Single-treatment results did not last longer than a week, but researchers also found that repeated doses of laughing gas over several weeks led to longer-lasting, more reliable relief.

Nitrous oxide might help depression by targeting brain receptors in a way similar to the fast-acting antidepressant ketamine, researchers said.

“Depression is a debilitating illness, made even more so by the fact that antidepressants make no meaningful difference for almost half of all patients diagnosed with it,” lead investigator Kiranpreet Gill, a doctoral researcher at the University of Birmingham, said in a news release.

“Our analyses show that nitrous oxide could form part of a new generation of rapid-acting treatments for depression,” Gill said. “Importantly, it provides a foundation for future trials to investigate repeated and carefully managed dosing strategies that can further determine how best to use this treatment in clinical practice for patients who don’t respond to conventional interventions.”

Further studies are needed to figure out the best nitrous oxide dose to treat depression, assess its long-term safety, and determine the right way to integrate it into existing treatments, researchers said.