Dartmouth Events

Please join us in Moore BO3 on Friday, April 5, 2019, at 4 p.m., as Yavin Shaham, PhD, Senior Investigator at National Institutes of Health Behavioral Neuroscience Branch, presents "Incubation of Drug Craving after Voluntary Abstinence: Behavior and Circuit Mechanisms."

Lecture Summary: In previous studies, we and others have used a rat model of drug relapse and craving to demonstrate time-dependent increases in drug seeking after experimenter-imposed (forced) abstinence from several drugs of abuse (heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, nicotine), a phenomenon we termed incubation of drug craving (Grimm et al. Nature, 2001; Pickens et al. TINS, 2011). In these studies, the rats were removed from their drug self-administration environment during extended periods of forced abstinence. More recently, we have established a rat model in which we observe incubation of drug craving after extended periods of voluntary abstinence in the drug environment. Voluntary abstinence is achieved using a mutually exclusive discrete choice procedure in which food-sated male and female rats with prior extended history of intravenous methamphetamine or heroin self-administration can choose every day (20 trials per day) between the palatable food and the drug. In this lecture, I will present our behavioral, pharmacological, and brain circuit characterization of incubation of drug craving after voluntary abstinence. I will also introduce a novel relapse model in which voluntary abstinence is achieved by providing the rats an alternative social reward.

A reception will follow outside of Moore 202.