Acute alcohol induces greater dose-dependent increase in the lateral cortical network functional connectivity in adult than adolescent rats

Abstract

Alcohol misuse and, particularly adolescent drinking, is a major public health concern. While evidence suggests that adolescent alcohol use affects frontal brain regions that are important for cognitive control over behavior, little is known about how acute alcohol exposure alters large-scale brain networks and how sex and age may moderate such effects. Here, we employ a recently developed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) protocol to acquire rat brain functional connectivity data and use an established analytical pipeline to examine the effect of sex, age, and alcohol dose on connectivity within and between three major rodent brain networks: default mode, salience, and lateral cortical network. We identify the intra- and inter-network connectivity differences and establish moderation models to reveal significant influences of age on acute alcohol-induced lateral cortical network connectivity. Through this work, we make brain-wide isotropic fMRI data with acute alcohol challenge publicly available, with the hope to facilitate future discovery of brain regions/circuits that are causally relevant to the impact of acute alcohol use.