Sir, We thank Dr Mavridis for this very thoughtful comment about nucleus accumbens atrophy in patients with Parkinson’s disease from a neurosurgical point of view. Indeed it had been previously reported that dopamine loss also occurs in the nucleus accumbens of patients with Parkinson’s disease especially at the advanced stages (Farley et al., 1977). Different groups, including our own have sho...

Sir, We thank Dr Mavridis for this very thoughtful comment about nucleus accumbens atrophy in patients with Parkinson’s disease from a neurosurgical point of view. Indeed it had been previously reported that dopamine loss also occurs in the nucleus accumbens of patients with Parkinson’s disease especially at the advanced stages (Farley et al., 1977). Different groups, including our own have sho...

Previous research has demonstrated an interaction between the effects of amphetamine and exposure to a novel environment on the activity of neurons in the nucleus accumbens. Given a model in which these accumbens efferents gate the excitability of basal forebrain cholinergic corticopetal neurons, the administration of intra-accumbens amphetamine was hypothesized to potentiate the increase in co...

The role of glutamate receptor within the nucleus accumbens in morphine tolerance has been postulated. Previous studies have reported that glutamate receptors exert their effects in part through the release of nitric oxide (NO). In the present study the effects of intra-accumbal injections of L-arginine (0.3, 1, and 3 ?g/rat), the NO precursor and L-NAME (0.3, 1, and 3 ?g/rat), the NOS inhibito...

BACKGROUND Addictive drugs lead to reinforcing properties by increasing dopamine in the nucleus accumbens, which is composed of a core and shell regions. Neurons in the nucleus accumbens are divided into 2 subtypes based on the differential gene expression of the dopamine D₁ receptors and D₂ receptors. METHODS In the present study, we investigated the role of D₂ receptors in the nucleus accum...

The nucleus accumbens is thought to contribute to action selection by integrating behaviorally relevant information from multiple regions, including prefrontal cortex. Studies in rodents suggest that information flow to the nucleus accumbens may be regulated via task-dependent oscillatory coupling between regions. During instrumental behavior, local field potentials (LFP) in the rat nucleus acc...

We have previously shown that animals acquired robust conditioned place preference (CPP) to either social interaction alone or cocaine alone. Recently it has been reported that drugs of abuse abnormally activated p38, a member of mitogen-activated protein kinase family, in the nucleus accumbens. In this study, we aimed to investigate the expression of the activated form of p38 (pp38) in the nuc...

Obesity is a major public health problem. Palatability (i.e., the reinforcing value of food, derived from orosensory cues) is a significant factor in determining food intake and contributes to increased consumption leading to obesity. The nucleus accumbens is a ventral striatal region that is important for both appetitive and consummatory behaviors and has been implicated in modulating palatabi...

BACKGROUND It is proposed that changes in reward processing in the brain are involved in the pathophysiology of pain based on experimental studies. The first aim of the present study was to investigate if reward drive and/or reward responsiveness was altered in patients with chronic pain (PCP) compared to controls matched for education, age and sex. The second aim was to investigate the relatio...

Contralateral turning was produced by unilateral injection of carbachol (0.5, 2.5, 5 micrograms) into the nucleus accumbens, but not into the dorsal or ventral striatum. This behaviour was inhibited by muscarinic M1 acetylcholine receptor blockade in the nucleus accumbens, and less effectively by blockade of muscarinic M2 and nicotinic acetylcholine receptors. Unilateral injection of a mixture ...