Reinstatement of Pavlovian responses to alcohol cues by stress

Pavlovian cue-evoked alcohol seeking is disrupted by ventral pallidal inhibition

“…Here we only assessed the impact of optogenetic inhibition on Pavlovian alcohol-seeking in male rats. A rich prior literature, including our own work, has documented that female rodents, including Long Evans rats, consume more g/kg ethanol on average than male rodents, under both continuous and intermittent access conditions (Li and Lumeng, 1984;Lancaster and Spiegel, 1992;Juárez and De Tomasi, 1999;Priddy et al, 2017;Lorrai et al, 2019;Aguirre et al, 2020;Carpio et al, 2022;Armstrong et al, 2023). While we previously reported no significant sex differences in training trajectories or plateaus during both Pavlovian conditioning for alcohol and training with an alcohol discriminative stimulus (Carpio et al, 2022;Armstrong et al, 2023), it is possible that Pavlovian conditioned responses to alcohol cues in female rats may be differentially impacted by, or resistant to, peri-cue inhibition of the VP.…”

“…Prior to surgery and Pavlovian conditioning rats were pre-exposed to ethanol in the home cage as described previously (Simms et al, 2008; Remedios et al, 2014; Millan et al, 2017; Armstrong et al, 2023). First, they received 1 week of continuous access to 10% ethanol, followed by intermittent access to 20% ethanol for 24 hours at a time, starting on Monday, Wednesday and Friday (MWF), for a period of 7 weeks.…”