Journal
NEUROPSYCHOPHARMACOLOGY
Volume 38, Issue 3, Pages 446-454Publisher
NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP
DOI: 10.1038/npp.2012.200
Keywords
periadolescent; development; opiate; c-Fos; relapse; reinstatement
Categories
Funding
- NIH [1 RO3 DA020110-01]
- Center for Behavioral Neuroscience NSF Science and Technology Center [IBN-9876754]
- Brains and Behavior Program at Georgia State University
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Adolescent drug abuse is hypothesized to increase the risk of drug addiction. Yet male rats that self-administer heroin as adolescents show attenuated drug-seeking after abstinence, compared with adults. Here we explore a role for neural activity in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) in age-dependent heroin-seeking. Adolescent (35-day-old at start; adolescent-onset) and adult (86-day-old at start) male rats acquired lever-pressing maintained by heroin using a fixed ratio one reinforcement schedule (0.05 and 0.025 mg/kg per infusion). Following 12 days of forced abstinence, rats were tested for heroin-seeking over 1 h by measuring the number of lever presses on the active lever. Unbiased stereology was then used to estimate the number of Fos-ir(+) and Fos-ir(-) neurons in prelimbic and infralimbic mPFC. As before, adolescents and adults self-administered similar amounts of heroin, but subsequent heroin-seeking was attenuated in the younger rats. Similarly, the adolescent-onset group failed to show significant neural activation in the prelimbic or infralimbic mPFC during the heroin-seeking test, whereas the adult-onset heroin self-administration group showed two to six times more Fos-ir(+) neurons than their saline counterparts in both mPFC subregions. Finally, the overall number of neurons in the infralimbic cortex was greater in rats from the adolescent-onset groups than adults. The mPFC may thus have a key role in some age-dependent effects of heroin self-administration. Neuropsychopharmacology (2013) 38, 446-454; doi:10.1038/npp.2012.200; published online 17 October 2012
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available