Effects of Chronic Cocaine Self-Administration on Cognition and Cerebral Glucose Utilization in Rhesus Monkeys

Background: Chronic cocaine use is associated with neurobiological and cognitive deficits that persist into abstinence, hindering success of behavioral treatment strategies and perhaps increasing likelihood of relapse. The effects of current cocaine use and abstinence on neurobiology and cognition are not well characterized. Methods: Adult male rhesus monkeys with an extensive cocaine self-administration history (similar to 5 years) and age-matched control animals (n = 4/group) performed cognitive tasks in morning sessions and self-administered cocaine or food in afternoon sessions. Positron emission tomography and [F-18]-fluorodeoxyglucose were employed to assess cerebral metabolic rates of glucose utilization during cognitive testing. Results: Cocaine-experienced monkeys required significantly more trials and committed more errors on reversal learning and multidimensional discriminations, compared with control animals. Cocaine-naive, but not cocaine-experienced, monkeys showed greater metabolic rates of glucose utilization during a multidimensional discrimination task in the caudate nucleus, hippocampus, anterior and posterior cingulate, and regions associated with attention, error detection, memory, and reward. Using a delayed match-to-sample task, there were no differences in baseline working memory performance between groups. High-dose cocaine self-administration disrupted delayed match-to-sample performance but tolerance developed. Acute abstinence from cocaine did not affect performance, but by day 30 of abstinence, accuracy increased significantly, while performance of cocaine-naive monkeys was unchanged. Conclusions: These data document direct effects of cocaine self-administration on cognition and neurobiological sequelae underlying cognitive deficits. Improvements in working memory can occur in abstinence, albeit across an extended period critical for treatment seekers, suggesting pharmacotherapies designed to enhance cognition may improve success of current behavioral modification strategies.