Functional Category
Cognitive & Nootropic
Last updated
Compounds whose principal reported action is on the brain: attention, memory, mood regulation, neurotransmitter tone, and the growth and remodelling of connections between neurons. It is a functional shelf rather than a mechanism, so it holds molecules working by very different routes. A compound is filed on its principal target, so a metabolic compound with reported effects on mental clarity stays under Metabolic.
Why it matters here
Getting into the brain is the hard part, and a compound that acts on a cultured neuron may never reach the tissue from an injection site, which is why the mechanism rung and the outcome rung on these records so often disagree.
What it is not
Nootropic and neurotropic look almost identical and mean different things: a nootropic is claimed to improve mental performance, while neurotropic simply means acting on nerve tissue, which includes compounds making no cognitive claim at all. Nootropic is also a marketing category with no regulatory or scientific threshold behind it.
Also called
- nootropic
- cognitive
- neuro
- neurotropic
- brain
Neurotropic is in the alias list because people type it when they mean nootropic, not because the two are equivalent. Brain and neuro are search shorthand rather than terms of art.
Compounds carrying this term
None on file yet. This term is in the controlled vocabulary but no compound record currently uses it — which is a statement about our coverage, not about the term.