Aporphine alkaloids and their antioxidant medical application: From antineoplastic agents to motor dysfunction diseases

One of the biggest challenges in the modern medicine and the food industry is to provide chemical agents that, incorporated in the foods, could have some pharmacological properties, but mainly that can protect and preserve our health from oxidative stress, and could be used in clinical treatments against some chronic diseases with minor side effects. In this sense, aporphine alkaloids have been the group of nitrogen compounds more studied in nature, incorporated in many foods and with a wide therapeutic application. Examples such as (-)- boldine (12), (-)-liridinine (15), (+)-lirinidine (16) and glaucine (24) have been studied for their interesting antioxidant activity and, in case of 24, synthetic modifications have managed to generate derivatives that exhibit more efficient antioxidant activity. Therefore, clinical treatment against oxidative stress-related diseases, such as Parkinson´s disease, anticancer, antinociceptive, therapeutic applications among other mentioned in this review, gives the possibility of using these aporphine alkaloids of low cytotoxicity as an excellent alternative in the development of new therapeutic patterns using the duplicity; biologically active ingredient-antioxidant.