Journal
BEHAVIORAL NEUROSCIENCE
Volume 122, Issue 2, Pages 460-465Publisher
AMER PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOC
DOI: 10.1037/0735-7044.122.2.460
Keywords
adolescent; extinction; reinstatement; cocaine; place-conditioning
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Funding
- NIDA NIH HHS [R01 DA015403, R01 DA026485] Funding Source: Medline
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Adolescence is a transitional period during development that is associated with a greater likelihood of addiction to drugs than any other age. One possibility for this observation is that learned associations between the rewarding experience of drugs and drug-related cues may produce greater motivational salience, and thus are more difficult to extinguish. Using an unbiased place-conditioning paradigm with two doses of cocaine (10 mg/kg or 20 mg/kg), the authors show here that adolescents require 75 +/- 17% more extinction trials than adults to extinguish cocaine place-preferences. Furthermore, once extinguished, adolescents display a greater preference for a previously cocaine-paired environment upon drug-primed reinstatement compared with adults. These results suggest that adolescent vulnerability to addiction involves robust memories for drug-associated cues that are difficult to extinguish. Therefore, drug-addicted adolescents may have a higher risk of relapse than adults, leading to greater prevalence of addiction in this population.
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