Project Summary

Mariana Pereira, Ph.D. (Young Investigator 2008) of Rutgers University, notes that cocaine addiction in women during the postpartum period is associated with dysfunctional maternal care, which can result in the later development of substance abuse and/or other psychiatric disorders in the child. Her preclinical model uses a dual-choice paradigm based on the conditioned place preference procedure (CPP) to offer postpartum maternal rats (dams) a choice between cues associated with pups and cocaine. This study will test the hypothesis that preference for pup- versus cocaine-associated cues is regulated by the concerted activity of regionally distributed networks of neurons within the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), nucleus accumbens (NA), and medial preoptic area/ventral bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (mPOA/vBST) that are differentially activated when dams have a preference for pup- or cocaine-associated cues.

Program Area: ADDICTION/SUBSTANCE-RELATED DISORDERS\Cocaine

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