Nicole L Schramm-Sapyta

..Animal models, in which age of onset can be tightly controlled, offer a platform for testing causality. Many animal models address drug effects that might promote or discourage drug intake and drug-induced neuroplasticity...

..First, do reduced aversive effects of ethanol in younger rats correlate with increased ethanol consumption? Second, are the reduced aversive effects in adolescents attributable to reduced sensitivity to ethanol's physiologic effects?..

..Here, a rodent model is used to explore the causality of early onset in development of self-administration and addiction-like behavior and to examine factors that promote self-administration...

..Unpleasant side effects of drugs of abuse often limit their repeated use; however, such effects may be attenuated in adolescents compared to adults...

..Taken together, these findings indicate that sensitivity to cocaine’s motivational effects is stable across development and part of a unique neurological process...

..Thus, behavioral phenotypes correlated with individual differences in cocaine/saccharin consumption in an age-related manner...

..This contributes to our understanding of why adolescence is a particularly vulnerable period for development of drug abuse...

..We assessed an array of behavioral and hormonal characteristics in adolescent (28-day-old) male rats before exposure to ethanol, and then determined which rats were most prone to high levels of alcohol drinking...

..This faster version of the delay discounting task will facilitate future studies involving pharmacological, electrophysiological, and other mechanistic studies of the underlying basis of this important disease process...

..These studies will assess whether adolescence is truly a vulnerable period for development of addiction. ..

..Finally, I will examine the effects of PKA transgene induction on Nac-dependent, addiction-related behavioral models, namely conditioned place preference and response reinforcement learning. ..