Discriminative stimuli are sufficient for incubation of cocaine craving
- National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institutes of Health, United States
Abstract
In abstinent drug addicts, cues formerly associated with drug-taking experiences gain relapse-inducing potency ('incubate') over time. Animal models of incubation may help develop treatments to prevent relapse, but these models have ubiquitously focused on the role of conditioned stimuli (CSs) signaling drug delivery. Discriminative stimuli (DSs) are unique in that they exert stimulus-control over both drug taking and drug seeking behavior and are difficult to extinguish. For this reason, incubation of the excitatory effects of DSs that signal drug availability, not yet examined in preclinical studies, could be relevant to relapse prevention. We trained rats to self-administer cocaine (or palatable food) under DS control, then investigated DS-controlled incubation of craving, in the absence of drug-paired CSs. DS-controlled cocaine (but not palatable food) seeking incubated over 60 days of abstinence and persisted up to 300 days. Understanding the neural mechanisms of this DS-controlled incubation holds promise for drug relapse treatments.
Data availability
All data generated or analyzed during this study, and needed to evaluate the conclusions in the paper, are included in the manuscript and supplementary materials.
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Funding
National Institute on Drug Abuse (DA000467-15)
- Bruce T Hope
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: This study was performed in strict accordance with the recommendations in the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals of the National Institutes of Health (8th edition; http://grants.nih.gov/grants/olaw/Guide-for-the-Care-and-Use-of-Laboratory-Animals.pdf). All rat experiments were approved by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (Protocol# 17-BNRB-203) of the Intramural Research Program of the National Institute on Drug Abuse.
Copyright
This is an open-access article, free of all copyright, and may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, modified, built upon, or otherwise used by anyone for any lawful purpose. The work is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication.
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Discriminative stimuli are sufficient for incubation of cocaine craving
eLife 8:e44427.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.44427
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