Organic Compounds: Amphetamine and Methamphetamine as Structural Analogs

Organic compounds: Amphetamine and Methamphetamine as Structural Analogs
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Organic compounds: Amphetamine and Methamphetamine as Structural Analogs
Introduction
Organic compounds have been exploited in drug developments because of their extreme diversity in structures and functions. In organic chemistry, the structure of compounds refers to the manner in which carbon atoms are bonded and the functional groups they have. Depending on the structure, these compounds present notable similarities and differences in their functions. Compounds that have similar structures but differ in terms of their functions are known as structural analogs. Amphetamine and methamphetamine are examples of structural analogs that differ in the arrangement functional groups and the atoms present. This paper discusses the similarities and differences in the function of amphetamine and methamphetamine to understand the reason why these compounds have different applications in chemistry and therapy in particular.
Methamphetamine (METH), a derivative of D-amphetamine (AMPH) shares a common chemical skeleton, phenylethylamine, which has structurally been modified to result in different clinical effects as shown in Fig 1. Both AMPH and METH are pharmacologically classified as psychostimulants that cause excessive release of dopamine into the dopaminergic neurons. METH is however known to be more potent compared to AMPH when it comes to psychostimulation. While research studies have shown both METH and AMPH to have same pharmacokinetic characteristics, the two drugs have different abuse rates. METH is an often abused drug compared to AMPH, meaning that these two compounds ...