Social learning promotes nicotine self-administration by facilitating the extinction of conditioned aversion in isogenic strains of rats

Abstract Both social environment and genetic factors are critical for smoking initiation and nicotine addiction. We reported that rats developed conditioned flavor (i.e., taste and odor) aversion to intravenously self-administered (IVSA) nicotine, and that social learning promoted nicotine IVSA with...

Description complète

Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Wenyan Han, Tengfei Wang, Hao Chen
Format: article
Langue:EN
Publié: Nature Portfolio 2017
Sujets:
R
Q
Accès en ligne:https://doaj.org/article/70b48e995ffd4189a6cdfdba0af811d6
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
Description
Résumé:Abstract Both social environment and genetic factors are critical for smoking initiation and nicotine addiction. We reported that rats developed conditioned flavor (i.e., taste and odor) aversion to intravenously self-administered (IVSA) nicotine, and that social learning promoted nicotine IVSA with flavor cues. We thus tested the hypothesis that socially acquired nicotine IVSA is a heritable trait by using female rats of six inbred strains and six F1 hybrids. Each strain was tested for 10 daily IVSA sessions. We found that the intake of nicotine (15 and 30 μg/kg/inf) varied among these strains by 33.7–56.6-fold. The heritability of nicotine intake was estimated to be 0.54–0.65. Further, there was a strong correlation in nicotine intake (R2 = 0.85, p < 0.0001) between the two nicotine doses. Another cohort of rats was given three daily IVSA sessions followed by five sessions that tested conditioned flavor aversion. Nicotine intake was highly correlated with the extinction of the conditioned aversion (R2 = 0.58, p < 0.005). These data showed that nicotine intake in the socially acquired nicotine self-administration model is controlled by genetic factors and that the role of social learning is likely in facilitating the extinction of conditioned aversive response to nicotine.