Objective: Opiate addiction is characterized by compulsive drug use and severe withdrawal symptoms during abstinence. Heantos 4, an herbal pharmacotherapy recently approved for opiate withdrawal treatment in Vietnam, has shown anti-craving properties. The present study is the first preclinical assessment of the effects of Heantos 4 on opiate withdrawal and the rewarding properties of morphine, ...

background: role of nitric oxide (no) on expression of morphine conditioning using a solely classic task has been proposed previously. in this work, the involvement of no on the expression of opioid-induced conditioning in the task paired with an injection of naloxone was investigated. methods: conditioning was established in adult male wistar rats (weighing 200-250 g) using an unbiased procedu...

Repeated exposure to drugs of abuse produces forms of experience-dependent plasticity including behavioral sensitization. Although a single exposure to many addicting substances elicits locomotor sensitization, there is little information regarding the motivational effects of such single exposures. This study demonstrates that a single cocaine exposure enhances both rewarding and aversive forms...

The conditioned rewarding effects of novelty compete with those of cocaine for control over choice behavior using a place conditioning task. The purpose of the present study was to use multiple doses of cocaine to determine the extent of this competition and to determine whether novelty's impact on cocaine reward was maintained over an abstinence period. In Experiment 1, rats were conditioned w...

Modafinil is a novel wake-promoting drug with FDA approval for the treatment of narcolepsy, shift work sleep disorder, and sleep apnea. It is also prescribed for many off-label uses such as ADHD and it is currently being assessed as a treatment for psychostimulant dependence. Previous research assessing the abuse liability of modafinil in animals and humans suggests it is less potent and has a ...

Outbred, male Sprague-Dawley rats can be classified as either low or high cocaine responders (LCRs or HCRs, respectively) based on cocaine-induced locomotor activity in an open-field arena. This difference reflects cocaine's ability to inhibit the striatal dopamine transporter and predicts development of sensitization. To investigate the relationship between initial cocaine locomotor responsive...

The reinforcing effects of addictive drugs including methamphetamine (METH) involve the midbrain ventral tegmental area (VTA). VTA is primary source of dopamine (DA) to the nucleus accumbens (NAc) and the ventral hippocampus (VHC). These three brain regions are functionally connected through the hippocampal-VTA loop that includes two main neural pathways: the bottom-up pathway and the top-down ...

Place conditioning is widely used to study the conditioned rewarding effects of drugs. In the standard version, one reward (cocaine) is compared with no reward (saline). A modified variant of this task, 'reference-conditioning' procedure, compares two potentially rewarding stimuli (high vs. low cocaine dose). There has been little research on the utility of this procedure. Experiment 1 used the...

Two competing theories predict different effects on memory consolidation when the amygdala is inactivated after fear conditioning. One theory, based on studies using inhibitory avoidance training, proposes that the amygdala modulates the strength of fear learning, and post-training amygdala manipulations interfere with memory consolidation. The other, based on studies using Pavlovian fear condi...