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Holly et al. (2012) and Vassoler et al. (2013)

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The first of the two papers, Holly et al. (2012), is an interesting look into the effects of stress at different stages in the estrogen cycle on behavioral and neural sensitization as well as self-administration of cocaine. Although the paper was compelling, it left me with a lot of questions. Why in Figure 2 is their increased walk duration with cocaine administration in the non-stressed females-estrus? I feel like the authors just kind of moved passed this and never addressed it. Additionally, the entire paper I could not stop thinking about how maybe this study could lead to an additional study looking into immune responses linked to stress and how that might vary in different stages of the estrogen cycle and effect behavioral and neural sensitization as well self-administration of cocaine, as I learned in Brain, Behavior, and Immunity that there are studies that show how immune responses can impact addiction. A final thought I had with this paper is if be defeated by a lactating dam is really the same as being defeated by male? There article stated that there was no difference in latency to the first bite, total number of bites received, or duration of defeat encounter was observed  but does it cause the animal a different kind of stress and maybe to have a different physical reaction?
The second of the two papers,Vassoler et al. (2013), I enjoyed a little more because I felt it was more straightforward in what it was attempting to accomplish, establishing that paternal cocaine ingestion can alter gene expression of the male offspring. In the first paper it mentioned that in 2010, 35.9% of cocaine users in the USA were female. That means the majority of users were male. This second paper almost seems to offer an explanation for this human behavior, making it more translational in my opinion than the first. Overall, these two papers were enjoyable read and provide a good insight into cocaine addiction.

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