Has anyone tried apomorphine or looked deeper into its potential as a behaviour altering substance? I wonder whether it could improve motivation and increase dominant personality traits based on the assumption that dopamine plays a significant role in those and that apomorphine is a dopamine agonist.
https://en.wikipedia...iki/Apomorphine
Apomorphine was also used as a private treatment of heroin addiction, a purpose for which it was championed by the author William S. Burroughs. Burroughs and others claimed that it was a "metabolic regulator" with a restorative dimension to a damaged or dysfunctional dopaminergic system. There is more than enough anecdotal evidence to suggest that this offers a plausible route to an abstinence-based model; however, no clinical trials have ever tested this hypothesis.
Apomorphine also reduces the breakdown of dopamine in the brain (though it inhibits its synthesis as well).[19][20]
It is a powerful upregulator of certain neural growth factors,[21] in particular NGF and BDNF, epigenetic downregulation of which has been associated with addictive behaviour in rats.[22][23]
We next examined the time course of NGF secretion, as well as that of BDNF and GDNF, by mouse astrocytes incubated with 88 mM apomorphine (Fig. 2). The NGF content in the culture medium was not affected by apomorphine up to 2 h, but increased rapidly to 20-fold of the control at 4 h, 50-fold at 6 h, and 122-fold (1681 pg/ml, P , 0.001, Student’s t-test) at 24 h (Fig. 2A). The BDNF content was not significantly altered by apomorphine, compared with the control value throughout the period of time examined (Fig. 2B). The GDNF content remained at the control level up to 6 h but increased significantly to 1.8-fold (42 pg/ml, P , 0.005, Student’s t-test) by apomorphine at 24 h (Fig. 2C).
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Expression of GDNF mRNA increased with time, reaching the maximum level at 15 h (2.9-fold of the control) after the addition of apomorphine before subsequent decrement at 24 h (Fig. 4)
https://libgen.lc/sc...2&downloadname=
https://pubmed.ncbi....h.gov/10872797/
Despite morphine in its name, it has no binding on opioid receptors by the way. It does have some downsides:
It is a potent emetic and should not be administered without an antiemetic such as domperidone. The emetic properties of apomorphine are exploited in veterinary medicine to induce therapeutic emesis in canines that have recently ingested toxic or foreign substances.
A. N. Ernst then discovered in 1965 that apomorphine was a powerful stimulant of dopamine receptors.[42] This, along with the use of sublingual apomorphine tablets, led to a renewed interest in the use of apomorphine as a treatment for alcoholism. A series of studies of non-emetic apomorphine in the treatment of alcoholism were published, with mostly positive results.
As the drug is known to be reasonably safe for use in humans, it is a viable target for repurposing.
Apomorphine has been researched as a possible treatment for erectile dysfunction and female hypoactive sexual desire disorder, though the arousal effects were found not to be reliable enough
Apomorphine is reported to be an inhibitor of amyloid beta protein (Aβ) fiber formation, whose presence is a hallmark of Alzheimer's disease (AD), and a potential therapeutic under the amyloid hypothesis
Some clinic seems to be offering apomorphine for erectile dysfunction and claims it also improves motivation of their patients
