Bromantane

Overview

Bromantane is a synthetic aminoadamantane small molecule, not a peptide. Bromantan is the preferred-name spelling in PubChem and the spelling used by WADA; Ladasten is a Russian prescription brand containing adamantylbromphenylamine. Russia currently lists Ladasten as an anti-asthenic medicine for asthenic states and neurasthenia.

Its regulatory status and its evidence quality are separate questions. Russian registration confirms that a particular medicinal product is authorised there. It does not make unregulated internet bromantane equivalent to that product, establish FDA or EU authorisation, or remove the limitations of the clinical literature.

Verified identity

PubChem records CID 4660557, formula C16H20BrN, molecular weight 306.24 g/mol, CAS 87913-26-6, UNII N1ILS53XWK and IUPAC name N-(4-bromophenyl)adamantan-2-amine. FDA's substance-registration system confirms the same UNII and synonyms, while explicitly warning that a UNII does not imply regulatory review or approval.

The PeptideGuide row called the compound “Bromantane” and expanded it as “Ladasten,” but Ladasten is a brand name rather than a chemical expansion. Its sole citation lead, PMID 19240853, is a Noopept study in rats and does not concern bromantane. PeptideGuide's mechanism, dose, half-life and green safety badge were therefore not accepted as evidence.

What the mechanism evidence supports

The current Russian product description attributes Ladasten's effects to dopaminergic and GABA-related modulation. Laboratory studies in rats report changes in tyrosine-hydroxylase expression, dopamine-related measures and hippocampal synaptic plasticity. Those experiments support biological plausibility, but animal dosing and molecular changes do not establish the size of a clinical effect or a complete human receptor mechanism.

The product information reports a terminal half-life of 11.21 hours. That is a product-information value, not a guarantee for every person, and the accessible public human pharmacokinetic record is too thin to support the rounded PeptideGuide value as an independently reproduced estimate.

Human evidence: what was actually studied

Small placebo-controlled neurasthenia study

The most informative placebo comparison published in 2009 was randomized but single-blind, with 15 participants per group. Participants received Ladasten or placebo for 28 days followed by one week of placebo. All 15 Ladasten participants completed treatment, whereas only 7 of 15 placebo participants completed it. That severe and unequal attrition can exaggerate between-group differences.

The paper reported adverse events in 7 of 15 Ladasten participants and 4 of 15 placebo participants. Ladasten-group events included headache, anxiety, irritability and increased blood pressure; no serious event was reported. The one-week substitution period did not reveal a withdrawal syndrome, but a 30-person short trial cannot establish absence of dependence or rare harms with broader or longer use.

Large Russian multicentre programme

A 2010 report analysed 728 patients from 28 Russian centres after 28 days of Ladasten treatment. Its abstract reported improvement on clinical-global and quality-of-life measures, adverse events in 3% and discontinuation in 0.8%. However, the indexed abstract does not describe randomisation or a comparator group. Without a concurrent control, the study cannot separate drug effect from natural recovery, regression to the mean, expectation or co-interventions.

Healthy-volunteer and derivative reports

A 2009 exploratory study (PMID 19642584) involved 20 healthy volunteers, ten receiving a single 100 mg dose and ten placebo. Its small sample, single exposure and many psychophysiological outcomes do not establish long-term safety or treatment efficacy. Later publications analysed subjective response and EEG subgroups from related neurasthenia material; they should not be counted as independent replications of a large new trial.

One integrity warning is especially important: the PubMed abstract for the 2011 subjective-response paper (PMID 22288153) states a 15 mg test dose, while the Russian journal page states 50 mg. Because that discrepancy is unresolved, this article does not use the paper to define a dose.

Russian literature and evidence limits

Russian-language and Russia-origin searching is essential here because nearly the entire clinical programme was conducted and published in Russia. A named PubMed search retrieved dozens of records, dominated by Russian animal pharmacology, older clinical reports and later re-analyses. The newest clearly treatment-focused human publications found in that lane were from the early 2010s; no modern large, independently replicated, double-blind confirmatory trial was located.

This does not mean the older studies are worthless. They establish that Ladasten was studied in humans and describe specific signals and adverse events. It does mean that registration, repeated papers from overlapping research networks and a large uncontrolled cohort must not be rewritten as contemporary high-certainty efficacy.

Current regulatory picture

Current Russian drug directories reflecting the state register show active prescription registration LP-№(005486)-(РГ-RU) dated 16 May 2024, replacing the older national record LSR-010257/08. The authorised indications listed are asthenic states of different origins and neurasthenia. Contraindications include pregnancy, breastfeeding, age under 18 and hypersensitivity; the product information also mentions excessive activation, sleep-onset problems, allergic reactions and caution with driving because dizziness can occur.

Named searches current to 2 August 2026 returned no Bromantane/Ladasten match in the Drugs@FDA dataset, the EU central Union Register dataset or ClinicalTrials.gov. FDA separately identified bromantane as an unapproved drug in a 2019 import-and-sale enforcement case. These are bounded database findings: they do not prove the status of every country, and FDA's substance-identity record is not an approval.

Practical safety boundary

The published human safety base is too small and too old to define rare, long-term, psychiatric, cardiovascular, reproductive or interaction risks with confidence. The Russian product information and short trials cannot be generalized to powders, nasal sprays or capsules sold online under the same name. Product identity, purity and exposure may differ materially.

For an athlete, the WADA issue is unambiguous: Bromantan is named in S6.A and prohibited in competition. For a patient in Russia, this is a prescription-medicine decision. For everyone else, a web dose or “nootropic stack” does not substitute for jurisdiction-specific medical and regulatory review.

Evidence bottom line

Bromantane is a chemically defined, non-peptide Russian medicine with genuine human research—not a molecule supported only by anecdotes. But the controlled evidence is small and vulnerable to bias, the large cohort lacks a comparator in its indexed report, much of the mechanistic case is preclinical, and modern independent replication is missing. The defensible conclusion is therefore narrow: Russian prescription registration and early clinical signals are real; broad claims about cognition, productivity, anxiety relief, safety or dependence are not established to modern high-certainty standards.