Dyadic social interaction inhibits XXXX -conditioned place preference and the associated activation of the accumbens corridor.

@entity6100 @entity146 @entity935 @entity73 @entity19 @entity14745 @entity2072 @entity9829
@entity73 is a hallmark symptom of many @entity146 . In substance use disorders, @entity73 is triply harmful (a) because addicts increasingly prefer the drug of abuse to the natural reward of drug-free social interaction, thus worsening the progression of the disease by increasing their drug consumption, (b) because treatment adherence and, consequently, treatment success itself depends on the ability of the recovering addict to maintain social interaction and adhere to treatment, and (c) because socially interacting with an individual suffering from a substance use disorder may be harmful for others. Helping the addict reorient his/her behavior away from the drug of abuse toward social interaction would therefore be of considerable therapeutic benefit. This article reviews our work on the neural basis of such a reorientation from @entity2072 , as a prototypical drug of abuse, toward dyadic (i.e. one-to-one) social interaction and compares our findings with the effects of other potentially beneficial interventions, that is, environmental enrichment or paired housing, on the activation of the accumbens and other brain regions involved in behavior motivated by drugs of abuse or nondrug stimuli. Our experimental models are based on the conditioned place preference paradigm. As the therapeutically most promising finding, only four 15 min episodes of @entity6100 were able to inhibit both the subsequent reacquisition/re-expression of preference for @entity2072 and the neural activation associated with this behavior, that is, an increase in the expression of the @entity9829 gene @entity14745 ( @entity14745 , @entity14745 ) in the nucleus accumbens, basolateral and central amygdala, and the ventral tegmental area. The time spent in the @entity2072 -associated conditioning compartment was correlated with the density of @entity14745 -activated neurons not only in the medial core (AcbCm) and medial shell (AcbShm) of the nucleus accumbens, but was observed in all regions medial to the anterior commissure ('accumbens corridor'), including (from medial to lateral), the vertical limb of the diagonal band and the medial septum (VDB+MS), the major island of Calleja and the intermediate nucleus of the lateral septum (ICjM+LSI), the AcbShm, and the AcbCm. All effects were limited to GABAergic projection neurons (called 'medium spiny neurons', in the accumbens), encompassing both @entity935 D1 receptor-expressing and D2 receptor-expressing medium spiny neuron subtypes. Our @entity14745 expression findings were mirrored in multielectrode array recordings. Finally, we have validated our paradigm in C57BL/6 @entity19 to make use of the plethora of transgenic models available in this genus.
