Abstract
BackgroundIncentives to promote drinking (“happy hour”) can encourage faster rates of alcohol consumption, especially in women. Sex differences in drinking dynamics may underlie differential health vulnerabilities relating to alcohol in women versus men. Herein, we used operant procedures to model the happy hour effect and gain insight into the alcohol drinking dynamics of male and female rats.MethodsAdult male and female Wistar rats underwent operant training to promote voluntary drinking of 10% (w/v) alcohol (8 rats/sex). We tested how drinking patterns changed after manipulating the effort required for alcohol (fixed ratio, FR), as well as the length of time in which rats had access to alcohol (self-administration session length). Rats were tested twice within the 12 h of the dark cycle, first at 2 h (early phase of the dark cycle, “early sessions”) and then again at 10 h into the dark cycle (late phase of the dark cycle, “late sessions”) with an 8-h break between the two sessions in the home cage.ResultsAdult females consumed significantly more alcohol (g/kg) than males in the 30-min sessions with the FR1 schedule of reinforcement when tested late in the dark cycle. Front-loading of alcohol was the primary factor driving higher consumption in females. Changing the schedule of reinforcement from FR1 to FR3 reduced total consumption. Notably, this manipulation had minimal effect on front-loading behavior in females, whereas front-loading behavior was significantly reduced in males when more effort was required to access alcohol. Compressing drinking access to 15 min to model a happy hour drove up front-loading behavior, generating alcohol drinking patterns in males that were similar to patterns in females (faster drinking and higher intake).ConclusionsThis strategy could be useful for exploring sex differences in the neural mechanisms underlying alcohol drinking and related health vulnerabilities. Our findings also highlight the importance of the time of testing for detecting sex differences in drinking behavior.
Highlights
Incentives to promote drinking (“happy hour”) can encourage faster rates of alcohol consumption, especially in women
Voluntary alcohol drinking is higher in adult female rats compared to adult male rats
This sex difference is most pronounced in the later phase of the dark cycle, and when the operant effort is minimal
Summary
Incentives to promote drinking (“happy hour”) can encourage faster rates of alcohol consumption, especially in women. Sex differences in drinking dynamics may underlie differential health vulnerabilities relating to alcohol in women versus men. Serious long-term effects of AUD are presented differently in men and women even when drinking levels are comparable, with higher risks of alcohol-related liver disease, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and brain damage in women compared to men [5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12]; reviewed in [13,14,15,16,17]. Incentives can alter the drinking dynamics of alcohol consumption in humans, such as “happy-hour” [32, 33]. Women are 1.45 times more likely to report experiencing altered drinking (drinking more, drinking more quickly, or both) during happy hour events than men, which may be due to receiving drinks rather than buying them and/ or as a consequence of being targeted for gender-specific specials such as “ladies’ night” or “ladies’ happy hour” [34]
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