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.
More information: 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)
Provided by Elsevier
"Rats, like humans, return to drinking once punishment is removed." January
30th, 2013. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-01-rats-humans.html
Posted by
Robert Karl Stonjek
Robert Karl Stonjek
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