Abstract
Rationale
People with tobacco addiction have deficits in cognition, in particular deficits in attention. It is not clear however, whether deficits are a cause or a consequence, or both, of chronic nicotine use. Here we set out a series of experiments in rats to address this question and, more specifically, to assess the effects of exposure to and withdrawal from chronic nicotine self-administration on attentional performance.
Methods
Animals were trained in a 5-choice serial reaction time task to probe individual attentional performance and, then, were given access to a fixed versus increasing dose of intravenous nicotine for self-administration, a differential dose procedure known to induce two between-session patterns of nicotine intake: a stable versus escalation pattern. Attentional performance was measured daily before, during and also 24-h after chronic access to the differential dose procedure of nicotine self-administration.
Conclusions
We found that pre-existing individual variation in attentional performance predicts individual vulnerability to develop escalation of nicotine intake. Moreover, while chronic nicotine self-administration increases attention, withdrawal from nicotine intake escalation induces attentional deficits, a withdrawal effect that is dose-dependently reversed by acute nicotine. Together, these results suggest that pre-existing individual variation in attentional performance predicts individual vulnerability to develop escalation of nicotine intake, and that part of the motivation for using nicotine during escalation might be to alleviate withdrawal-induced attentional deficits.
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Funding
This work was supported by the French Research Council (CNRS), the Université de Bordeaux, and the French National Agency (ANR- 15-CE37-0008–01; K.G.).
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K.G. designed research and experiments; C.V.M. and K.G. performed behavioral experiments and associated data analysis; K.G. and S.H.A. wrote the paper.
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Vouillac-Mendoza, C., Ahmed, S.H. & Guillem, K. Bidirectional relationship between attentional deficits and escalation of nicotine intake in male rats. Psychopharmacology (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00213-024-06604-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00213-024-06604-x