Striatal alcohol cue‐reactivity is stronger in male than female problem drinkers

Kaag, Anne Marije; Wiers, Reinout W.; Vries, Taco J. De; Pattij, Tommy; Goudriaan, Anna E.

doi:10.1111/ejn.13991

Cited by 32 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 62 publications

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“…Dovetailing with results in clinical samples, cue reactivity studies with social drinkers have also reported increases in attentional bias [223,224], heart rate variability [225], and craving [226][227][228] in response to alcohol cues in heavy drinkers. Interestingly, Roy-Charland et al [223] observed that participants who consumed more alcohol performed more frequent saccades into and out of alcohol-related image parts, a behavior reminiscent of sign-tracking.…”

Section: Findings In Alcohol Use Disorder and At-risk Populationsmentioning

confidence: 77%

“…Translation of animal research to humans remains, however, challenging, with less clear-cut findings than animal studies due, at least in part, to heterogeneity in the paradigms used, employed measures of conditioning (implicit physiological, explicit self-report or neuronal), level of awareness about the conditioning procedure and modifying factors, such as comorbidities, AUD severity and duration, or context (e.g., enrollment in treatment programs or recent detoxification). This notwithstanding, alcohol cues have been extensively proven to induce attentional and psychophysiological changes and increase craving in individuals with AUD [202][203][204][206][207][208][209][210][211][212][213][214][215], as well as social drinkers [223][224][225][226][227][228]. However, in contrast to animal research, conditioning of alcohol cues in human studies has usually taken place outside of the experimenter's control and is thus subject to an indeterminate number of potential confounders.…”

Section: Discussion and Outlookmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Instrumental and Pavlovian Mechanisms in Alcohol Use Disorder

et al. 2020

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Purpose of Review Current theories of alcohol use disorders (AUD) highlight the importance of Pavlovian and instrumental learning processes mainly based on preclinical animal studies. Here, we summarize available evidence for alterations of those processes in human participants with AUD with a focus on habitual versus goal-directed instrumental learning, Pavlovian conditioning, and Pavlovian-to-instrumental transfer (PIT) paradigms. Recent Findings The balance between habitual and goal-directed control in AUD participants has been studied using outcome devaluation or sequential decision-making procedures, which have found some evidence of reduced goal-directed/model-based control, but little evidence for stronger habitual responding. The employed Pavlovian learning and PIT paradigms have shown considerable differences regarding experimental procedures, e.g., alcohol-related or conventional reinforcers or stimuli. Summary While studies of basic learning processes in human participants with AUD support a role of Pavlovian and instrumental learning mechanisms in the development and maintenance of drug addiction, current studies are characterized by large variability regarding methodology, sample characteristics, and results, and translation from animal paradigms to human research remains challenging. Longitudinal approaches with reliable and ecologically valid paradigms of Pavlovian and instrumental processes, including alcohol-related cues and outcomes, are warranted and should be combined with state-of-the-art imaging techniques, computational approaches, and ecological momentary assessment methods.

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Section: Findings In Alcohol Use Disorder and At-risk Populationsmentioning

confidence: 77%

Section: Discussion and Outlookmentioning

confidence: 99%

Instrumental and Pavlovian Mechanisms in Alcohol Use Disorder

et al. 2020

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“…Clinical studies report that reduced insular grey matter volume is correlated with increased alcohol expectancy in female problem drinkers, but not in male problem drinkers (42). Interestingly, insular activation is further enhanced by alcohol cues in alcohol-dependent women compared to non-dependent women, while men show greater alcohol cue reactivity in the striatum compared to women (43,44). In light of these previous reports, the current experiment supports the notion that different neural circuits regulate alcohol drinking behaviors in males and females.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sex differences in the ability of corticostriatal oscillations to predict rodent alcohol consumption

Henricks

Sullivan²,

Dwiel³

et al. 2019

Preprint

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Background: Although male and female rats differ in their patterns of alcohol use, little is known regarding the neural circuit activity that underlies these differences in behavior. The current study used a machine learning approach to characterize sex differences in local field potential (LFP) oscillations that may relate to sex differences in alcohol drinking behavior.Methods: LFP oscillations were recorded from the nucleus accumbens shell and the rodent medial prefrontal cortex of adult male and female Sprague-Dawley rats. Recordings occurred before rats were exposed to alcohol (n=10/sex X 2 recordings/rat) and during sessions of limited access to alcohol (n=5/sex X 5 recordings/rat). Oscillations were also recorded from each female rat in each phase of estrous prior to alcohol exposure. Using machine-learning, we built predictive models to classify rats based on: 1) biological sex; 2) phase of estrous; and 3) alcohol intake levels. We evaluated model performance from real data by comparing it to the performance of models built and tested on permutations of the data. Results:Our data demonstrate that corticostriatal oscillations were able to predict alcohol intake levels in males (p<0.01), but not in females (p=0.45). The accuracies of models predicting biological sex and phase of estrous were related to fluctuations observed in alcohol drinking levels; females in diestrus drank more alcohol than males (p=0.052), and the male vs. diestrus female model had the highest accuracy (71.01%) compared to chance estimates.Conversely, females in estrus drank similar amounts of alcohol to males (p=0.702), and the male vs. estrus female model had the lowest accuracy (56.14%) compared to chance estimates. Conclusions:The current data demonstrate that oscillations recorded from corticostriatal circuits contain significant information regarding alcohol drinking in males, but not alcohol drinking in females. Future work will focus on identifying where to record LFP oscillations in order to predict alcohol drinking in females, which may help elucidate sex-specific neural targets for future therapeutic development.

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“…The bilateral dorsal striatum (DS) ROI was defined anatomically as the caudate and putamen from the Harvard‐Oxford atlas, also binarized at a 0.5 probability threshold. Overlap between the VS and DS regions was subtracted from the DS mask to distinguish between dorsal and VS areas (Kaag et al, 2019; Liu et al, 2017). Analyses of group differences in DS and VS cue reactivity, as well as associations between cue reactivity and behavioral measures, were conducted in R as general linear models.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Clinical and Neural Correlates of Reward and Relief Drinking

Burnette

Grodin

Schacht

et al. 2020

Alcoholism Clin & Exp Res

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Background Alcohol use disorder (AUD) is heterogenous. One approach to parsing this heterogeneity is to phenotype individuals by their underlying motivation to drink, specifically drinking for reward (i.e., positive reinforcement) or for relief (i.e., negative reinforcement/normalizing). Reward‐ versus relief‐motivated behavior is thought to be associated with a shift from ventral to dorsal striatal (DS) signaling. The present study examined whether reward and relief drinking were differentially associated with other clinical characteristics and with alcohol cue‐elicited activation of the ventral and dorsal striatum. Methods Non–treatment‐seeking heavy drinkers (N = 184; 61 female, 123 male) completed the UCLA Reward, Relief, Habit Drinking Scale (RRHDS) and the Reasons for Heavy Drinking Questionnaire (RHDQ), to categorize drinking motivation. Measures of alcohol use, alcohol problems, mood, and craving were also collected. A subset of participants (N = 45; 17 female, 28 male) also completed a functional neuroimaging alcohol cue reactivity task. Results RRHDS‐designated relief/habit drinkers scored lower than reward drinkers on the RHDQ Reinforcement subscale (p = 0.04) and higher on the RHDQ Normalizing subscale (p = 0.004). Relief/habit drinkers also demonstrated greater AUD severity on a host of clinical measures. Relief/habit drinkers displayed higher cue‐elicited DS activation compared with reward drinkers (p = 0.04), while ventral striatal cue‐elicited activation did not significantly differ between groups. Conclusions Our findings support and extend the differentiation of reward from relief/habit‐motivated drinking and suggest that differences in DS response to conditioned alcohol cues may underlie this distinction. Elucidating neurobiological and clinical differences between these subtypes may facilitate treatment matching and precision medicine for AUD.

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Striatal alcohol cue‐reactivity is stronger in male than female problem drinkers

Cited by 32 publications

References 62 publications

Instrumental and Pavlovian Mechanisms in Alcohol Use Disorder

Instrumental and Pavlovian Mechanisms in Alcohol Use Disorder

Sex differences in the ability of corticostriatal oscillations to predict rodent alcohol consumption

Clinical and Neural Correlates of Reward and Relief Drinking

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