神经生物学

Among the different behavioral criteria used to discriminate substance dependence (or drug addiction) from other non-disordered forms of drug use, drug intake escalation presents a number of unique features that makes it particularly suitable for modeling in nonhuman animals. This ...

Eating disorders and drug addiction share many common traits. This includes biological and environmental factors that predispose individuals to develop either disorder, an increased risk for anxiety and depression when the disorders are present, and heightened trait levels of im ...

Exposure to psychostimulant drugs leads to sensitized locomotor responding, nucleus accumbens (NAcc) dopamine (DA) overflow, and drug self-administration upon reexposure to the drug weeks to months later. Calcium-dependent signaling pathways contribute importantly to b ...

Place conditioning is a form of stimulus–outcome learning that is commonly used to draw inferences about the rewarding and aversive effects of psychoactive drugs. This chapter focuses primarily on methodological issues that arise in the implementation and interpretation of place ...

This chapter provides an exhaustive overview of the current repertoire of animal models for alcoholism research. The chapter covers behavioral procedures modeling different stages of the alcohol addiction cycle, including strategies for investigating ethanol reinforcem ...

Intravenous self-administration (IVSA) studies have shown that nicotine can serve as a reinforcer in �animals and humans. Brain mechanisms underlying nicotine IVSA, as well as the effects of pharmacological interventions, have also been widely investigated and are summarized. Ho ...

Stimulants such as cocaine and the amphetamines are widely abused due to their rewarding effects. Much of what we know about drug abuse and drug reward comes from research involving stimulants, and much of this research involves using drug self-administration as an animal model of drug abuse. In t ...

Intracranial self-stimulation (ICSS) is an operant behavioral paradigm in which experimental animals learn to deliver brief electrical pulses into specific regions of their own brains that are considered to be part of the brain’s reward pathways mediating both natural and ICSS reward. ...

A variety of animal models have been developed to mimic the interactions between drugs and environment that are thought to play a crucial role in human addiction. A history of exposure to stress, for example, facilitates the development of drug addiction and drug relapse. Furthermore, there is s ...

Our increasing understanding of the psychological mechanisms involved in the transition from controlled to habitual compulsive drug use, the hallmark of drug addiction, relies on animal models in which the underlying behavioral construct reflects some of the main features of drug ad ...

The thesis of this chapter is that the unconscious (basic) craving process, consisting of activation within limbic incentive motivation and memory systems, is ultimately responsible for relapse behaviors. The chapter first includes a brief discussion of current clinical concept ...

Impulsivity is a multifaceted behavioural trait commonly linked to drug abuse and addiction involving rash or risky behaviour and a strong tendency towards spur-of-the-moment, poorly judged decisions and actions. At its core, impulsivity arises through an inability to adequately s ...

The act of bingeing represents the culmination of a potentially abusive behavioral routine, and underscores the beginning of an addiction cycle. Experimental binges provide a valid model for examining aspects of the gradual progression from drug use to abuse, particularly when attem ...

Drugs of abuse generate diverse behavioral and physiological effects. One feature common to many abused drugs is the phenomenon of “withdrawal,” which results from abrupt termination of drug administration. The initial phases of drug withdrawal, often referred to as the “crash” phase in h ...

The most insidious aspect of drug addiction in humans is a high and recurrent propensity to relapse. Over the past several decades, the reinstatement procedure has received widespread use as an animal model of drug relapse, to study the basic mechanisms underlying drug-seeking responses in l ...

Drug delivery to the central nervous system requires the use of specific portals to enable drug entry into the brain and, as such, there is a growing need to identify processes that can enable drug transfer across both blood-brain and blood–cerebrospinal fluid barriers. Phage display is a powerf ...

The development of imaging and therapeutic agents against neuronal targets is hampered by the limited access of probes into the central nervous system across the blood–brain barrier (BBB). The evaluation of drug penetration into the brain in experimental models often requires complex ...

Standard chemotherapy administered systemically has a limited efficacy in the treatment of brain tumors. One of the major obstacles in the treatment of brain neoplasias is the impediment to delivery across the intact blood-brain barrier (BBB). Many innovative approaches have been dev ...

Promoting functional recovery after ischemic brain injury has emerged as a potential approach for the treatment of ischemic stroke. An ideal restorative approach to enhance long-term functional recovery is to promote postischemic angiogenesis and neurogenesis. This chapter d ...

The blood–nerve barrier (BNB) is one of the functional barriers sheltering the nervous system from circulating blood. It is very important to understand the cellular properties of endothelial cells of endoneurial origin because these cells constitute the bulk of the BNB. This chapter des ...