Dr. William Hodos NACS Seminar: Dr. Amy Arguello

Adolescent cocaine use, relapse, and social interactions during abstinence periods

Drug use during adolescence has the potential to permanently alter brain processes and increase the life-long risk to develop substance use disorders (SUDs). Adolescents are particularly sensitive to peer-peer interactions- they are more likely to consume drugs with peers who engage in drug use. Preclinical studies have also shown that adult and young rats self-administer more cocaine in the presence of another cocaine-administering peer. However, less is known about the neural mechanisms by which adolescent cocaine exposure impacts social behavior. We established an abbreviated self-administration procedure and found that adolescent cocaine-exposed rats showed incubation of craving in a cocaine-associated environment. To take a first step in understanding the impact of adolescent cocaine use on social behaviors, we administered cocaine or saline (intraperitoneal injection) to adolescent male rats, followed by social interaction between saline-saline, cocaine-cocaine, or saline-cocaine pairs (15min/d for 5d). Using supervised machine learning (DeepLabCut and SimpleBehavioralAnalysis), we analyzed a suite of social behaviors between each interaction group. To uncover novel brain mechanisms underlying cocaine-induced changes in social behavior, we examined inputs to the dorsal hippocampus (DH) and found dense innervation from the perirhinal cortex (PRh), regions critical for contextual relapse and processing social information, and found reduced PRh activation in adolescent cocaine-cocaine, vs saline-saline, interacting rats suggesting a novel role of this circuit in cocaine-modulated social behaviors. 

Dr. Amy Arguello is an Assistant Professor at Michigan State University.

Dr. William Hodos NACS Seminars are free and open to the public.