TY  - JOUR
AU  - Hakus, Aileen
AU  - Foo, Jerome Clifford
AU  - Casquero-Veiga, Marta
AU  - Gül, Asude Zülal
AU  - Hintz, Franziska
AU  - Rivalan, Marion
AU  - Winter, York
AU  - Priller, Josef
AU  - Hadar, Ravit
AU  - Winter, Christine
TI  - Sex-associated differences in incentive salience and drinking behaviour in a rodent model of alcohol relapse.
JO  - Addiction biology
VL  - 30
IS  - 1
SN  - 1355-6215
CY  - Hoboken, NJ [u.a.]
PB  - Wiley-Blackwell
M1  - DZNE-2025-00049
SP  - e70009
PY  - 2025
AB  - The ability of environmental cues to trigger alcohol-seeking behaviours is thought to facilitate problematic alcohol use. Individuals' tendency to attribute incentive salience to cues may increase the risk of addiction. We sought to study the relationship between incentive salience and alcohol addiction using non-preferring rats to model the heterogeneity of human alcohol consumption, investigating both males and females. Adult rats were subjected to the alcohol deprivation effect (ADE) paradigm, where they were given voluntary access to different alcohol solutions with repeated interruptions by deprivation and reintroduction phases over a protracted period (five Alcohol Deprivation Cycles). Before each Alcohol Deprivation Cycle, rats were tested in the Pavlovian Conditioned Approach (PCA) paradigm, which quantifies the individual salience toward a conditional cue and the reward, thus allowing us to trace the process of attributing incentive salience to reward cues. During the final Alcohol Deprivation Cycle (ADE5), animals were tested for compulsive-like behaviour using quinine taste adulteration. We investigated sex differences in drinking behaviour and PCA performance. We observed thatb females drank significantly more alcohol than males and displayed more sign-tracking (ST) behaviour in the PCA, whereas males showed goal-tracking (GT) behaviour. Furthermore, we found that high drinkers exhibited more ST behaviour. The initial PCA phenotype was correlated with later alcohol consumption. Our findings indicate a complex relationship between incentive salience and alcohol addiction and emphasize the importance of considering both sexes in preclinical research.
KW  - Animals
KW  - Male
KW  - Female
KW  - Rats
KW  - Motivation
KW  - Cues
KW  - Conditioning, Classical: physiology
KW  - Alcoholism: physiopathology
KW  - Disease Models, Animal
KW  - Alcohol Drinking: psychology
KW  - Reward
KW  - Recurrence
KW  - Behavior, Animal
KW  - Sex Factors
KW  - Sex Characteristics
KW  - Ethanol: pharmacology
KW  - Pavlovian conditioned approach (Other)
KW  - alcohol addiction (Other)
KW  - alcohol deprivation effect model (Other)
KW  - goal tracker (Other)
KW  - incentive salience (Other)
KW  - sign‐tracker (Other)
KW  - Ethanol (NLM Chemicals)
LB  - PUB:(DE-HGF)16
C6  - pmid:39764698
C2  - pmc:PMC11705499
DO  - DOI:10.1111/adb.70009
UR  - https://pub.dzne.de/record/274068
ER  -