Environmental Cues, Alcohol Seeking, and Consumption in Baboons: Effects of Response Requirement and Duration of Alcohol Abstinence

Abstract

Alcohol self-administration and consumption were sensitive to increases in response requirement and duration of alcohol abstinence, while seeking was only enhanced by duration of alcohol abstinence. This animal model may be useful to further examine the interactions between environmental cues and behaviors associated with seeking and consumption of alcohol and to evaluate the efficacy of potential alcohol treatment drugs on these behaviors.

Goal- and signal-directed incentive: conditioned approach, seeking, and consumption established with unsweetened alcohol in rats

“…In past experiments, we used a sweetened ethanol solution as the reinforcer both for maintaining responding on the operant schedule and for establishing Pavlovian conditioning (Krank 1989(Krank , 2003Krank and Wall 1990). Although these animals received a dose between 1 and 2 g/kg and achieved a blood ethanol concentration of between 50 and 100 mg/dl, the observed results may have been due to associations with the sweetness of the solution rather than ethanol's effects (Corbit and Janak 2007;Weerts et al 2006). In the present study, ethanol self-administration was maintained with an unsweetened ethanol solution.…”

“…Second, although the conditioning effects of the cue light for ethanol reinforcement are clear, the role of ethanol as a reinforcer in our previous experiments may be questioned because a sweetened ethanol solution was used (Corbit and Janak 2007;Weerts et al 2006). In our previous studies of cue effects, the ethanol reinforcer was sweetened to enhance palatability (Krank 1989(Krank , 2003Krank and Wall 1990).…”

Nucleus accumbens AGS3 expression drives ethanol seeking through Gβγ

“…Accordingly, there is considerable interest in neuroadaptations that develop during periods of abstinence that may promote drug seeking and relapse (3). Enhanced EtOH seeking during abstinence is observed in heavy social drinkers (4), non-human primates (5), and rodents (2,(6)(7)(8)(9), where this EtOH deprivation effect is hypothesized to model many aspects of compulsive EtOH seeking and consumption (refs. 2, 6, 8, but see ref.…”

Will peak provoked craving prove superior to cue–reactivity?

“…Recent animal studies have suggested that the drugseeking response to drug-related cues increases with prolonged drug abstinence [12,13], and human studies have indicated similarly that cue-induced cigarette craving increases across the time-course of abstinence [14]. This suggests a complex and dynamic relationship between cue-induced craving and abstinence, including potentially abstinence-induced craving.…”

“…It is therefore perhaps unsurprising that they correlate only minimally with self-report measures of craving [11], despite both ostensibly capturing a common underlying construct. What this illustrates is that ostensibly objective measures of psychological phenomena which have good face validity may lack basic psychometric properties such as acceptable internal reliability.Recent animal studies have suggested that the drugseeking response to drug-related cues increases with prolonged drug abstinence [12,13], and human studies have indicated similarly that cue-induced cigarette craving increases across the time-course of abstinence [14]. This suggests a complex and dynamic relationship between cue-induced craving and abstinence, including potentially abstinence-induced craving.…”