Dopamine sensitization by methamphetamine treatment prior to instrumental training delays the transition into habit in female rats

Schoenberg, Hannah L.; Evans, Charlotte; Bausch, Lauren; Wootton, Abigail B; Kirshenbaum, Ari P.; Toufexis, Donna

doi:10.1016/j.bbr.2021.113636

Cited by 5 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 50 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…The ability of IntA to enhance compulsive cocaine self-administration has only been evaluated in males and has not been examined in females (James et al, 2019). Furthermore, a recent study showed that dopamine sensitization, which appears to be central to IntA's effects on addiction-like behavior, differentially affects the rate of habit formation in males and females (Schoenberg et al, 2022), suggesting that IntA could have differential effects on the rate at which DLS dopamine-dependent, habit-like cocaine seeking is established between sexes.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Intermittent cocaine self-administration has sex-specific effects on addiction-like behaviors in rats

Bender

Torregrossa

2022

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Intermittent access (IntA) models of cocaine self-administration were developed to better model in rodents how cocaine is used by human drug users. Compared to traditional continuous access (ContA) models, IntA has been shown to enhance several pharmacological and behavioral effects of cocaine, but few studies have examined sex differences in IntA. Moreover, no one has examined the efficacy of cue extinction to reduce cocaine seeking in the IntA model, which has previously shown to be ineffective in other models that promote habit-like cocaine seeking. Therefore, rats were implanted with jugular vein catheters and dorsolateral striatum (DLS) cannulae and trained to self-administer cocaine paired with an audiovisual cue with ContA or IntA. In subsets of rats, we evaluated: the ability of Pavlovian cue extinction to reduce cue-induced drug seeking; motivation for cocaine using a progressive ratio procedure; compulsive cocaine taking by pairing cocaine infusions with footshocks; and dependence of drug-seeking on DLS dopamine (a measure of habit-like behavior) with the dopamine antagonist cis-flupenthixol. Overall, cue extinction reduced cue-induced drug seeking after ContA or IntA. Compared to ContA, IntA resulted in increased motivation for cocaine exclusively in females, but IntA facilitated more compulsive cocaine taking exclusively in males. After 10 days of IntA training, but not fewer, drug-seeking was dependent on DLS dopamine most notably in males. Our results suggest that IntA may be valuable for identifying sex differences in the early stages of drug use and provide a foundation for the investigation of the mechanisms involved.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%