🧠 Related to dopamine 💊 A dopamine drug

dopaminergic

8.5

A drug that increases or acts like dopamine in the brain

noun
/ˌdoʊpəˈmɪnərdʒɪk/

Specialized

: dopaminérgico

Understanding how dopaminergic mechanisms work is crucial for developing treatments for addiction.

Examples

So I would not have suspected the kind of dopaminergic manipulation that social media does.
And because the neurotransmitters never get returned to their neurons, the dopaminergic and serotonergic systems get depleted, drawn down, drained out.

Academic text (2010)
The formulation that underlies the research described here is that increased VTA-DA dopaminergic activity is necessary for reward from alcohol, similar to reward from other substances of abuse, but it is not proposed that this is needed for all rewards.

Academic text (2016)
Muscarinic acetylcholine, dopaminergic (D2), and histamine (H1) receptors are especially numerous.

Academic text (2003)
Research has shown that dopaminergic agents can help alleviate symptoms of Parkinson's disease.
The doctor prescribed a dopaminergic drug to improve her mood and motivation.

Surface Forms

dopaminergic singular

dopaminergics plural

Morphology

dopaminergic = dopamine (opaque) = dopamine + ergic

The word is built from dopamine + -ergic, but the specialized biomedical suffix makes the full meaning hard to infer for an average B1 learner.

Etymology

Dopaminergic comes from dopamine and the part -ergic, which means 'working with' and is like the 'erg' in 'energy'. So a dopaminergic (a drug or agent) is something that 'acts on' or 'boosts' dopamine, which is why doctors call medicines that increase or copy dopamine's effects dopaminergics.