Abstract
Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is an emerging noninvasive brain neuromodulation technique aimed at relieving symptoms associated with psychiatric disorders, including addiction. The goal of the present study was to better identify which phase of alcohol-related behavior (hedonic effect, behavioral sensitization, self-administration, or motivation to obtain the drug) might be modulated by repeated anodal tDCS over the frontal cortex (0.2 mA, 20 min, twice a day for 5 consecutive days), using female mice as a model. Our data showed that tDCS did not modulate the hedonic effects of ethanol as assessed by a conditioned place preference test (CPP) or the expression of ethanol-induced behavioral sensitization. Interestingly, tDCS robustly reduced reacquisition of ethanol consumption (50% decrease) following extinction of self-administration in an operant paradigm. Furthermore, tDCS significantly decreased motivation to drink ethanol on a progressive ratio schedule (30% decrease). Taken together, our results show a dissociation between the effects of tDCS on “liking” (hedonic aspect; no effect in the CPP) and “wanting” (motivation; decreased consumption on a progressive ratio schedule). Our tDCS procedure in rodents will allow us to better understand its mechanisms of action in order to accelerate its use as a complementary and innovative tool to help alcohol-dependent patients maintain abstinence or reduce ethanol intake.
Highlights
Transcranial direct current stimulation is an emerging noninvasive brain neuromodulation technique aimed at relieving symptoms associated with psychiatric disorders, including addiction
An increasing number of clinical studies indicate that the application of Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) over the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) decreases drug craving in chronic users[14]
We evaluated the effects of tDCS on the expression of ethanol-induced behavioral sensitization, which has been hypothesized to reflect drug-induced long-term neuroplasticity in the nucleus accumbens[49]
Summary
Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is an emerging noninvasive brain neuromodulation technique aimed at relieving symptoms associated with psychiatric disorders, including addiction. TDCS attenuates both smoking behavior and attention to smokingrelated cues[21,22,23,24,25,26,27] and reduces the craving for several drugs of abuse such as m arijuana28, methamphetamine[29,30,31], and alcohol in heavy drinkers and alcohol-dependent s ubjects[19,20,32,33,34,35,36,37,38,39,40,41,42] The mechanisms underlying these beneficial effects, remain poorly known. We evaluated the effects of tDCS on the expression of ethanol-induced behavioral sensitization, which has been hypothesized to reflect drug-induced long-term neuroplasticity in the nucleus accumbens[49]. The consumption of ethanol was voluntary, i.e., the mice controlled their oral consumption
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