If there are people with medical conditions causing low dopamine levels, and we use injectable dopamine in medicine, why can’t it be used regularly at home?
In: Biology
Dopamine itself can’t be administered orally due to its poor absorption- it has to be administered intravenously, which isn’t something normally left to a patient.
Many drugs have this limitation. One of the most daunting tasks in drug development is getting a pharmaceutical through the gastrointestinal system and the woodchipper that is the human liver without losing its effectiveness. IV administration bypasses this to an extent.
IV dopamine is also only used to treat specific medical conditions, and dosing is very important to avoid negative secondary effects throughout the body. So medical supervision is critical.
I believe it’s along the lines of substance abuse where because you’re body is getting dopamine from an outside source, it stops creating as much dopamine, which isn’t really fixing the solution, actually making it 100 times worse.
people would use it so much that they’d develop a tolerance for it, rendering it ineffective and making the problem 100x worse
Anytime you supplant a naturally made compound in the body it causes the body to slow or even stop production of said compound , leading to a crash in the short term or reliance upon the artificial compound as the genes down regulate in the long. Similar to people who take insulin or meth. It’s a horrible idea to rely on medication if the body doesn’t lack the ability to form it naturally, it causes more problems than it helps.
Extra questions:
Would it be addictive?
Would taking it mean less is produced by the body?
We do!
For Parkinson’s (lack of dopamine in certain parts of the brain) we give oral L-dopa (a precursor of dopamine)
For depression, bupropion (Wellbutrin) is a very commonly used dopiminergic agent that works via reducing pre-synaptic dopamine reuptake (like many other anti depressants do for serotonin).
Substances of abuse, namely cocaine and stimulants, also work to increase the amount of dopamine in various synapses.
Latest Answers