Combined Behavioral and Pharmacological Treatments to Prevent Common Mechanisms of Cocaine and Stress to trigger relapse to drug use

CANCELA LILIANA M; DE GIOVANNI LAURA; AVALOS MARIA PAULA; GUZMAN ANDREA SUSANA; VIRGOLINI MIRIAM B; BOLLATI FLAVIA

Baltimore

Conferencia; United Scientific Group. 2nd International Conference on Addiction Medicine and Reward Deficiency Syndrome; 2017

Relapse is a common feature of cocaine addiction. In rodents, it can be elicited by cues, stress or the drug. Restraint stressinducedreinstatement of cocaine-conditioned place preference (CPP) is a useful model to study the mechanisms involved instress-induced relapse of drug-seeking behavior. There is evidence that the glutamate ionotropic NMDA and metabotropicmGluR2/3 and mGluR5 receptors are critically involved in drug- and cue-induced reinstatement of seeking behavior and drug-CPP responses. The aim of this study was to investigate the contribution of these receptors within nucleus accumbent (NAc)core vs. shell to restraint stress-induced reinstatement of cocaine-CPP. After extinction of cocaine-conditioned preference,animals were administered with the MK 801, MPEP or LY 379268, systemically and/or into intra-core or intra-shell beforerestraint (30 min) or left undisturbed in their home-cage. Three days later these animals were evaluated in a second stress ordrug-induced reinstatement. Since during the second reinstatement the effect mirrored that observed in the first one, another setof experiments explored a possible influence of the pharmacological treatments on the drug memory reconsolidation processes.First, we demonstrated that restraint stress-induced reinstatement of extinguished cocaine-CPP was blocked by MK 801 orMPEP intra-core, but not intra-shell, administration. Second, we showed that all pharmacological treatments administeredimmediately, but not three hours later, of the first stress-induced reinstatement or the reactivation/evocation session (withoutstress exposure) suppressed a second stress or drug-induced relapse to cocaine. Pharmacological treatments during the memoryreconsolidation window could help to prevent relapse to drug use following stress or drug.