Abstract
Drug-discrimination (DD) techniques can be used to study abuse-related effects by establishing the interoceptive effects of a training drug (e.g., cocaine) as a cue for performing a specific operant response (e.g., lever pressing reinforced by food). During training with this protocol, pressing one lever is reinforced when the training drug is injected before the start of the session, and responding on a second lever is reinforced when vehicle is injected before the session. Lever choice during test sessions can then be used as an indication of whether a novel drug has effects similar to the training drug, or whether a potential therapeutic alters the effects of the training drug. Although training can be lengthy (up to several months), the pharmacological specificity of DD procedures make them a perfect complement to other techniques used to study drug-abuse phenomena, such as intravenous self-administration and conditioned place-preference procedures.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Intramural Research Program of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, National Institutes of Health, and Department of Health and Human Services, by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, the University of Maryland School of Medicine, and by Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. We thank J. Eaton for preparation of Figure 1.
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Solinas, M., Panlilio, L., Justinova, Z. et al. Using drug-discrimination techniques to study the abuse-related effects of psychoactive drugs in rats. Nat Protoc 1, 1194–1206 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1038/nprot.2006.167
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nprot.2006.167
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