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Abstract
Opioid use disorder is a psychological condition that affects over 200,000 people per year in the U.S., causing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to label the crisis as a rapidly spreading public health epidemic. The behavioral relationship between opioid exposure and development of opioid use disorder (OUD) varies greatly between individuals, implying existence of sup-populations with varying degrees of opioid vulnerability. However, effective pre-clinical identification of these sub-populations remains challenging due to the complex multivariate measurements employed in animal models of OUD. In this study, we propose a novel non-linear network-based data analysis workflow that employs seven behavioral traits to identify opioid use sub-populations and assesses contributions of behavioral variables to opioid vulnerability and resiliency. Through this analysis workflow we determined how behavioral variables across heroin taking, refraining and seeking interact with one another to identify potentially heroin resilient and vulnerable behavioral sub-populations. Data were collected from over 400 heterogeneous stock rats in two geographically distinct locations. Rats underwent heroin self-administration training, followed by a progressive ratio and heroin-primed reinstatement test. Next, rats underwent extinction training and a cue-induced reinstatement test. To enter the analysis workflow, we integrated data from different cohorts of rats and removed possible batch effects. We then constructed a rat-rat similarity network based on their behavioral patterns and implemented community detection on this similarity network using a Bayesian degree-corrected stochastic block model to uncover sub-populations of rats with differing levels of opioid vulnerability. We identified three statistically distinct clusters corresponding to distinct behavioral sub-populations, vulnerable, resilient and intermediate for heroin use, refraining and seeking. We implement this analysis workflow as an open source R package, named mlsbm.
Highlights
Opioid addiction is a chronic neuropsychiatric disorder characterized by compulsive drug taking and relapse, despite efforts to remain abstinent
We developed a comprehensive framework for the descriptive analysis of behavioral sub-populations, and applied it to the cohort of 451 outbred rats subject to heroin selfadministration exposure
We discovered the presence of batch effects between the two study sites that contributed to this cohort, and we corrected for these effects using study-site specific z-scoring
Summary
Opioid addiction is a chronic neuropsychiatric disorder characterized by compulsive drug taking and relapse, despite efforts to remain abstinent. Opioid use disorder (OUD) has risen substantially in the United States over the past two decades, for both prescription drugs [1], as well as illicit opioids, notably heroin [2]. Heroin use since 2000 has increased in all demographics, regardless of age, sex or socio-economic status [2, 4], suggesting factors independent of these are contributing to the escalation in OUD. This ubiquitous increase in heroin use and dependence across disparate populations highlights the need to assess how individual variation in multiple behavioral traits may be interacting to contribute to an OUD resilient vs vulnerable phenotype
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