S03-3vulnerability to voluntary binge drinking in rats using an operant self-administration procedure
Résumé
Binge drinking may play an important role in the development of alcohol addiction. In humans, binge drinking is still a confused concept even though one largely used definition indicates that blood alcohol levels reaching 0.8 g/l in 2 h may give an approximate picture of this behavior. Animal studies on binge drinking may be particularly interesting in order to better understand both the vulnerability factors and also the long term consequences of this behavior. However no relevant procedures do exist so far to make rats drinking alcohol very quickly to reach high levels of intoxication especially using operant procedure.
In the present study we investigated the vulnerability of adult male Wistar rats to drink 20% ethanol solution in an operant paradigm for only 15 minutes in order to reach high blood ethanol levels and behavioral signs of intoxication. In this population we investigated motivation in a progressive ratio schedule, the lever responses during a seeking session (no ethanol available) and also the correlation with anxiety-like behavior. We tested the predictive validity of our model with the effect of the different medications used to treat alcohol use disorder: acamprosate, naltrexone, nalmefene, GHB and baclofene. Finally we also tested the long term impact of several weeks of binge drinking on decision making using the rat gambling task and we measured dopamine phasic release in the nucleus accumbens using the fast-scan cyclic voltametry technique.
Overall our study brings a new procedure to study voluntary binge drinking in rats and both its vulnerability factors and long term consequences.