Topic: cocaine addiction

Impaired decision-making skills in patients with cocaine addiction are thought to drive both initiation and continuation of cocaine use despite its negative consequences. Literature suggests that females advance more quickly into substance use disorder, indicating sex-differences in vulnerability to drug addiction. The gambling task literature in patients addicted to cocaine and in rodents is inconsistent, and sex differences, if sex was not considered as a biological variable may have contributed to this. We hypothesize that chronic cocaine-exposure might affect decision-making in male and fe

Compulsive drug seeking is a key behavioral trait when studying transition to cocaine addiction in rodent models. Understanding how neurophysiological changes operate in circuits of compulsion, and searching for molecular markers to distinguish addictive vs. non-addictive individuals may help us to understand the mechanisms underlying cocaine addiction. Cocaine-evoked synaptic plasticity has been shown to correlate with addictive-like behavior in certain brain regions of the mesolimbic dopamine system. In the subthalamic nucleus (STN), specific oscillatory frequencies are associated to compuls

In the characterization of cocaine addiction, various of its rewarding and reinforcing properties have been studied. Recently, in-vivo fiber photometry (FP) monitoring of calcium in the nucleus accumbens (NAc) and prefrontal cortex (PFC) have provide relevant information in the understanding of acute cocaine effects. In addition, another finding have reported the potential effect of the M1 receptor-selective agonist VU0364572 on the cessation of cocaine-seeking behavior. Here, we hypothesized that VU0364572 has some potential neuromodulator properties over the in-vivo dynamics of calcium and g