Citation

Vozella V. Biol. Psychiatry 2024; 95(10): e23-e24.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2024, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.biopsych.2024.03.005

PMID

38692799

Abstract

Individual variability is a common feature across all species. Even monozygotic twins reared together might display behavioral differences and might respond differently to natural rewards or salient stimuli. Understanding how preexisting or innate individual differences can shape behavior is a fundamental focus of neuroscience, and it is the goal of personalized treatment development for many neuropsychiatric disorders, such as addiction and alcohol use disorder. Alcohol use disorder is a complex disease. When exposed to alcohol, some individuals consume low levels while others develop uncontrolled and pathological drinking, a phenomenon that environmental or genetic factors can only partially explain. While a large body of research has focused on the consequences of alcohol on brain functions, innate or baseline individual differences are still poorly investigated. In the current issue of Biological Psychiatry, Montgomery et al. used several state-of-the-art techniques across multiple elegant experiments to characterize how different innate profiles of the mesolimbic ventral tegmental area to nucleus accumbens (VTA→NAc) dopamine (DA) neuronal circuit precedes adaptive or maladaptive response to putatively rewarding stimuli. The goal was to uncover neural circuits and individual behavioral predictors of alcohol drinking phenotypes (low vs. high drinkers). To probe the VTA→NAc circuit and the behavioral predictors, Montgomery et al. relied on a series of naturalistic behaviors in C57BL/6J adult male mice, such as female pheromone, social interaction with a juvenile conspecific, and novel object interaction, followed by voluntary alcohol drinking in a 12-day, 2-bottle-choice alcohol drinking paradigm. This paradigm captures a broad range of voluntary drinking phenotypes, which are regulated by the mesocorticolimbic DA system, and allows researchers to identify higher drinkers versus lower drinkers...

Language: en

Keywords

Humans; *Alcohol Drinking/psychology; Brain/physiopathology