Effects of Acute Injection of Ethanol on the Mesolimbic Dopamine System in Freely Moving Rats

Alcohol is the third most important risk factor for disease in Russia and throughout the world. WHO data indicate that alcohol abuse kills 2.5 million people a year around the world, which is the population of a large city; of these, 600–700,000 occur in Russia. Despite the development of science an...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inNeuroscience and behavioral physiology Vol. 50; no. 6; pp. 762 - 765
Main Authors Mikhailova, M. A., Gainetdinov, R. R.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published New York Springer US 01.07.2020
Springer Nature B.V
Subjects
Abuse
Addictions
Alcohol
Alcohol abuse
Behavioral Sciences
Biomedical and Life Sciences
Biomedicine
Dopamine
Dopamine D2 receptors
Drug abuse
Drug dependence
Electrical stimuli
Ethanol
Mesolimbic system
Monoamines
Neurobiology
Neurosciences
Norepinephrine
Nucleus accumbens
Raclopride
Risk factors
Spatial discrimination
Ventral tegmentum
Russia
voltammetry
alcoholism
dopamine
ethanol
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Summary:Alcohol is the third most important risk factor for disease in Russia and throughout the world. WHO data indicate that alcohol abuse kills 2.5 million people a year around the world, which is the population of a large city; of these, 600–700,000 occur in Russia. Despite the development of science and medicine, the mechanisms underlying the development of alcohol dependence remain unclear. An understanding of these mechanisms will help create novel approaches to the treatment of alcohol dependence. It is now known that the mesolimbic dopamine system plays a key role in forming addictive disorders, particularly alcohol dependence. Fast scanning cyclic voltammetry (FSCV) is a widely used method for studying dopamine. An advantage of this method is its high time and spatial resolution, making FSCV a powerful method for detecting changes in monoamine neurotransmitter concentrations in vivo. Our studies using FSCV in freely moving animals demonstrated that electrical stimulation of the ventral tegmental area (VTA) leads to detection of dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens (NAcc). We showed that acute ethanol injections (0.5 g/kg) lead to significant decreases in dopamine release in the NAcc induced by electrical stimulation of the VTA in freely moving rats. Use of the selective dopamine D 2 autoreceptor antagonist raclopride significantly increased the measured signal, indicating that the incoming signal measured in the NAcc is dopaminergic rather than noradrenergic.
ISSN:0097-0549
1573-899X
DOI:10.1007/s11055-020-00963-6