History and a Brief Description of Armodafinil

Armodafinil is an oral drug used for promoting focus, alertness, and wakefulness. This drug is commonly prescribed to people suffering from narcolepsy, shift work sleep disorder, sleep apnea, and so on. People soon realized that this drug can be used to enhance mental performance of healthy individuals. This significantly enhanced its popularity, due to which it has become possible to buy armodafinil online too.

This drug was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in June 2007. However, it was not until 2016 that FDA granted the generic version of this drug to be marketed in the U.S.

The precursor of this drug was Modafinil, which consists of R-enantiomer and S-enantiomer. Of these two, R-enantiomer is considered to have a greater waking effect. This led to the creation of Armodafinil, where only R-enantiomer was kept while the S-enantiomer was removed. Due to this composition, Armodafinil is almost twice as strong as modafinil. In other words, it has a much longer half-life than modafinil and thus is relatively more useful in curbing excessive daytime sleepiness.

Various studies have been conducted on investigating the exact mechanism which makes this drug work. The studies show that this drug stimulates various neurotransmitters, such as, histamine, norepinephrine, dopamine, serotonin, and so on. The exact ways in which this drug counters the symptoms of different disorders is surely different.

This drug is associated with multiple side-effects, such as, headache, xerostomia, dizziness, insomnia, nausea, etc. Other symptoms, such as, depression, anxiety, hallucinations, anorexia, tremor, etc. have been associated with this drug, however, these associations have not yet been conclusive.

As already mentioned, the preference for armodafinil as a smart drug is constantly growing and the main reason for this is that it gives natural feeling of wakefulness. Furthermore, unlike other stimulants, the effect of this drug lasts much longer. Also, unlike many other psychoactive drugs, this does not alter the natural sleep pattern of the user.