Rats, like humans, return to drinking once punishment is removed

Reports new study in Biological Psychiatry

2013-01-30

(Press-News.org) Philadelphia, PA, January 30, 2013 – Once heavy drinking impairs function, a variety of punishment-related threats may motivate people to stop drinking: spouses may threaten divorce, employers may threaten job loss, and courts threaten drunk drivers with losing their driver's license or incarceration. In the face of these threats, many alcohol abusers refrain from drinking, but relapse is very common when the threats of punishment fade, particularly when exposed to alcohol-associated environments (contexts).

A new study by researchers at the National Institute on Drug Abuse suggests that rats may behave in the same way. This is important because a significant amount of addiction research is performed in animals, using models of addiction, before it is translated to work in humans.

"The better our animal models fit human alcoholism, the more our animal research will help us to understand the complexity of the human disorder and to develop new treatments," commented Dr. John Krystal, Editor of Biological Psychiatry.

Currently, the most commonly employed techniques to achieve alcohol abstinence in animal work are forced abstinence and/or extinction training, where a lever press that used to consistently deliver alcohol no longer does so. These models of relapse are limited because they do not incorporate behaviors that mimic a human's desire to avoid negative consequences of drinking.

To address this divergence between animal models and the human condition, Nathan Marchant and colleagues developed a rat relapse model in which voluntary alcohol intake is suppressed by punishment in an environment that is different from the original alcohol intake environment.

They showed that when rats were re-exposed to the original alcohol self-administration environment, after suppression of alcohol intake in a different environment by punishment, they immediately relapsed to alcohol seeking.

"A potential clinical implication of this preclinical finding is that abstinence induced by introducing adverse consequences on alcohol intake in inpatient treatment clinics would have a limited effect on subsequent alcohol use in the home environment after completion of treatment," commented Marchant.

As with nearly all such scientific work, the findings themselves are interesting, but they also lead to many more questions. What is the potential influence of medication or other manipulations on this model? Would the model hold up when other drugs of abuse or even food were studied? Does the passage of time have any effect on this model? More work will be undertaken to answer these and other related questions.

###The article is "Context-Induced Relapse to Alcohol Seeking After Punishment in a Rat Model" by Nathan J. Marchant, Thi N. Khuc, Charles L. Pickens, Antonello Bonci, and Yavin Shaham (doi: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2012.07.007). The article appears in Biological Psychiatry, Volume 73, Issue 3 (February 1, 2013), published by Elsevier.

Notes for editors Full text of the article is available to credentialed journalists upon request; contact Rhiannon Bugno at +1 214 648 0880 or Biol.Psych@utsouthwestern.edu. Journalists wishing to interview the authors may contact Nathan Marchant at +443 740 2704 or Nathan.marchant@nih.gov.

The authors' affiliations, and disclosures of financial and conflicts of interests are available in the article.

John H. Krystal, M.D., is Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine and a research psychiatrist at the VA Connecticut Healthcare System. His disclosures of financial and conflicts of interests are available here.

About Biological Psychiatry Biological Psychiatry is the official journal of the Society of Biological Psychiatry, whose purpose is to promote excellence in scientific research and education in fields that investigate the nature, causes, mechanisms and treatments of disorders of thought, emotion, or behavior. In accord with this mission, this peer-reviewed, rapid-publication, international journal publishes both basic and clinical contributions from all disciplines and research areas relevant to the pathophysiology and treatment of major psychiatric disorders.

The journal publishes novel results of original research which represent an important new lead or significant impact on the field, particularly those addressing genetic and environmental risk factors, neural circuitry and neurochemistry, and important new therapeutic approaches. Reviews and commentaries that focus on topics of current research and interest are also encouraged.

Biological Psychiatry is one of the most selective and highly cited journals in the field of psychiatric neuroscience. It is ranked 5th out of 129 Psychiatry titles and 16th out of 243 Neurosciences titles in the Journal Citations Reports® published by Thomson Reuters. The 2011 Impact Factor score for Biological Psychiatry is 8.283.

About Elsevier Elsevier is a world-leading provider of scientific, technical and medical information products and services. The company works in partnership with the global science and health communities to publish more than 2,000 journals, including The Lancet and Cell, and close to 20,000 book titles, including major reference works from Mosby and Saunders. Elsevier's online solutions include ScienceDirect, Scopus, Reaxys, ClinicalKey and Mosby's Nursing Suite, which enhance the productivity of science and health professionals, and the SciVal suite and MEDai's Pinpoint Review, which help research and health care institutions deliver better outcomes more cost-effectively.

A global business headquartered in Amsterdam, Elsevier employs 7,000 people worldwide. The company is part of Reed Elsevier Group PLC, a world-leading provider of professional information solutions in the Science, Medical, Legal and Risk and Business sectors, which is jointly owned by Reed Elsevier PLC and Reed Elsevier NV. The ticker symbols are REN (Euronext Amsterdam), REL (London Stock Exchange), RUK and ENL (New York Stock Exchange).

Media contact Rhiannon Bugno, Editorial Office
+1 214 648 0880
Biol.Psych@utsouthwestern.edu

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