Northwestern Events Calendar

Jun
17
2022

Neuroscience Seminar Series: Rafiq Huda, PhD, "Prefrontal cortical mechanisms for arousal-alcohol interactions"

When: Friday, June 17, 2022
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM CT

Where: Online
Webcast Link

Audience: Faculty/Staff - Student - Post Docs/Docs - Graduate Students

Contact: Emily Larsen   (312) 503-1687

Group: Department of Neuroscience Seminars

Category: Lectures & Meetings

Description:

Abstract:

Alcohol use disorder (AUD) is a chronic relapsing condition with tremendous personal, economic, and societal toll. Stress precipitates increased alcohol use in humans and in animal models under certain experimental conditions. Converging lines of evidence suggest that reciprocal interactions between alcohol use and stress-associated physiological responses (i.e., autonomic arousal) play a key role in AUD development. Repeated alcohol use renders a heightened physiological state accompanied by high basal levels of stress-related hormones and autonomic arousal. In turn, the severity of increased basal arousal correlates with alcohol use recurrence in treatment-engaged AUD patients. While these findings suggest that high basal arousal increases alcohol use, the neurobiological mechanisms mediating arousal-alcohol interactions are poorly understood. Previous work suggests that the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) subdivision of the prefrontal cortex is an important locus for top-down modulation of arousal and may coordinate arousal-alcohol interactions. A key challenge in testing this hypothesis is we currently lack preclinical animal models that allow simultaneous, longitudinal measurements of arousal and in-vivo recordings of neuronal activity during voluntary ethanol intake. We recently addressed this limitation by establishing a voluntary ethanol consumption paradigm for head-fixed mice that enables simultaneous two-photon calcium imaging and high-resolution measurement of arousal via pupillometry. I will present evidence from our ongoing work that ACC-dependent basal arousal modulates alcohol-related behavior and discuss future directions examining the role of ACC microcircuit in this process. Our experiments are providing important information on cortical mechanisms for arousal modulation of alcohol consumption, establishing ACC signaling as a potential therapeutic target for the treatment of alcohol use driven by aberrant arousal.

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