Scopolamine, known as hyoscine, or Devil's Breath, is a natural or synthetically produced tropane alkaloid and anticholinergic drug that is formally used as a medication for treating motion sickness and postoperative nausea and vomiting.
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Scopolamine is in the antimuscarinic family of drugs and works by blocking some of the effects of acetylcholine within the nervous system.
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Scopolamine was first written about in 1881 and started to be used for anesthesia around 1900.
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Scopolamine is the main active component produced by certain plants of the nightshade family, which historically have been used as psychoactive drugs due to their antimuscarinic-induced hallucinogenic effects.
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Scopolamine has a number of uses in medicine where it is used in low doses to treat:.
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Scopolamine can be taken by mouth, subcutaneously, in the eye, and intravenously, as well as via a transdermal patch.
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Scopolamine is a nonspecific muscarinic antagonist at all four muscarinic acetylcholine receptors.
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Scopolamine is among the secondary metabolites of plants from Solanaceae family of plants, such as henbane (Hyoscyamus niger), jimson weed (Datura), angel's trumpets (Brugmansia), deadly nightshade (Belladonna), mandrake (Mandragora officinarum), and corkwood (Duboisia).
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Scopolamine is reported to be the only active alkaloid within these plants that can effectively be absorbed through the skin to cause effects.
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Scopolamine can render a victim unconscious for 24 hours or more.
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Scopolamine is used as a research tool to study memory encoding.
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Scopolamine produces detrimental effects on short-term memory, memory acquisition, learning, visual recognition memory, visuospatial praxis, visuospatial memory, visuoperceptual function, verbal recall, and psychomotor speed.
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Scopolamine has been used to model the defects in cholinergic function for models of Alzheimer's, dementia, fragile X syndrome, and Down syndrome.
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Scopolamine has been investigated as a rapid-onset antidepressant, with a number of small studies finding positive results.
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