Skip to main content

Reversal of Addiction in Rats

By
The organization of the Venniro paper was extremely frustrating. At first read, the experiments seem to be laid out nicely with the subheadings, but the procedures and results were all over the place. It was so difficult to figure out the details of the methods, even with the supplementary note. I felt like some of the tests, or lack thereof, were random. Why, for instance, did they calculate addiction scores in two different ways? Why were females only used in two of the experiments that they performed? I felt like the researchers were trying to put a lot into this paper so that their conclusions could be significant, but it all felt a little bit messy to me. That being said, they did a good job at establishing a voluntary model that is more indicative of human behavior than previous forced abstinence models. As mentioned at the end of the paper, there are still several differences between this model and addiction in humans, but incorporating a social aspect is important. In addition, there are more confounding factors that I would like to see tested in this model. For example, if we depressed or stressed an animal, would they have the same preference for social interaction over drug administration? Social reward does not outperform drug administration in people, so I’d be interested to see if we could test other factors. I think, given the results from experiment 5, that there are several implications of this study. If we establish a pathway involving the PKCδ neurons in a similar experiment as the de Guglielmo paper, we could potentially find better targets to treat addiction. I’m also extremely curious as to if the PKCδ neurons were also activated when testing for heroin, since that is a different class of drug that seemed to have a similar result in regards to social choice as methamphetamine did. In the de Guglielmo paper, they didn’t look at PKCδ either, and I’d be curious as to if these neurons were also activated in alcohol addiction.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Gut-Brain Interactions: Buffington et al, Reber et al 2016

By
April 13 Papers (Buffington et. al, Reber et. al) I found this week’s papers to be quite novel in that they both proposed potential treatments for neurodevelopmental or psychiatric disorders that target bacterial or microbial abnormalities and how these give rise to certain behavioral and physical symptoms associated with the disorders. I thought this was a very unusual yet interesting approach, and as I have not previously studied the gut-brain axis, these papers offered me a fresh perspective on researching psychiatric and neurodevelopmental disorders. They were also unconventional in their focus of the physical symptoms that often accompany mental disorders, as this is not something that I have seen many other papers touch upon very much. Particularly, I was surprised by the Reber et al paper’s focus on the link between psychiatric disorders and inflammation in organs other than the brain, such as the colon, and the Buffington et al paper’s description of a relationship between ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Buffington et al. and Reber et al.: Gut-Brain Interactions

By
While I have not encountered a lot of gut-brain interaction literature yet. I found each paper unique and fascinating. Reber et al felt inaccessible for me. I felt like I didn’t understand what the goal of the paper really was and why they did the tests that they did. It seems like most of their relevant information got shoved into numerous supplementary figures and their behavior was quite difficult to follow. Multiple sections of their paper were supported with data found entirely in supplementary figures, which makes it difficult to follow the same conclusions. I have a few issues with the behavior they chose and because of this, I struggle to find driving conclusions from their work. I don’t understand why the CSC was not only the prior stressor but was also the acute stress condition both groups faced. To me, I feel like it would have made more sense to have the CSC be the prior stressor and then judge the effect on social behavior with maybe a three choice chamber test or te...
Post a Comment
Read more

Buffington et al (2016) and Reber et al. (2016)

By
This week's articles were about the role of the gut-brain axis in neurodevelopment and stress. Reber and colleagues used a heat-killed version of the bacteria, M. vaccae, as a type of vaccine and found that administration to mouse models resulted in decreased response to chronic stress, prevented colitis related to stress, and reduced measures of anxiety. Reber et al. also used the inactivated M. vaccae in a mouse model of IBD and found that the bacteria prevented stress-induce flare-ups of colitis, but that this could be reversed by removing T cells. Buffington and colleagues instead examined the role of gut microbiota in maternal high-fat diets (MHFD) in the neurodevelopment and social behaviors of their offspring. Buffington et al. found that housing MHFD rats with the offspring of regular diet (MRD) rats prevented social deficits in their offspring. They also found that this co-housing arrangement prevented an imbalance in the gut bacteria Reber and colleagues' findings w...
Post a Comment
Read more