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Effects of Acute Injection of Ethanol on the Mesolimbic Dopamine System in Freely Moving Rats

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Alcohol is the third most important risk factor for disease in Russia and throughout the world. WHO data indicate that alcohol abuse kills 2.5 million people a year around the world, which is the population of a large city; of these, 600–700,000 occur in Russia. Despite the development of science and medicine, the mechanisms underlying the development of alcohol dependence remain unclear. An understanding of these mechanisms will help create novel approaches to the treatment of alcohol dependence. It is now known that the mesolimbic dopamine system plays a key role in forming addictive disorders, particularly alcohol dependence. Fast scanning cyclic voltammetry (FSCV) is a widely used method for studying dopamine. An advantage of this method is its high time and spatial resolution, making FSCV a powerful method for detecting changes in monoamine neurotransmitter concentrations in vivo. Our studies using FSCV in freely moving animals demonstrated that electrical stimulation of the ventral tegmental area (VTA) leads to detection of dopamine release in the nucleus accumbens (NAcc). We showed that acute ethanol injections (0.5 g/kg) lead to significant decreases in dopamine release in the NAcc induced by electrical stimulation of the VTA in freely moving rats. Use of the selective dopamine D2 autoreceptor antagonist raclopride significantly increased the measured signal, indicating that the incoming signal measured in the NAcc is dopaminergic rather than noradrenergic.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Translational Biomedicine, St. Petersburg State University, St. Petersburg, Russia

    M. A. Mikhailova & R. R. Gainetdinov

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  1. M. A. Mikhailova
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  2. R. R. Gainetdinov
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Correspondence to M. A. Mikhailova.

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Translated from Rossiiskii Fiziologicheskii Zhurnal imeni I. M. Sechenova, Vol. 105, No. 7, pp. 853–860, July, 2019.

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Mikhailova, M.A., Gainetdinov, R.R. Effects of Acute Injection of Ethanol on the Mesolimbic Dopamine System in Freely Moving Rats. Neurosci Behav Physi 50, 762–765 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11055-020-00963-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11055-020-00963-6

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