Establishment of a choice procedure to study alcohol self-administration: Relevance to alcohol use disorder (2023)

Undergraduate: McKinley Windram

Faculty Advisor: Joyce Besheer
Department: Bowles Center for Alcohol Studies

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Operant self-administration is a well-established model for studying alcohol seeking and intake. However, it has limitations in its representation of realistic human drinking behavior. We developed a self-administration procedure that introduces free choice between and simultaneous availability of sucrose and alcohol that better reflects real-world scenarios where alcohol drinking is not the only available option. This design incorporates a non-drug reward, allows for analysis of preference, and is well-positioned for studying individual differences. In this experiment male and female Wistar rats were trained to separately self-administer alcohol and sucrose, then were trained with both options available simultaneously. Sucrose concentration was adjusted such that lever responding for sucrose was similar to responding for 15% alcohol. To validate the model, rats were tested with 3 doses of Naltrexone (0, 0.1, 0.3, 0.9 mg/kg, subcutaneous), an FDA-approved drug for alcohol use disorder known to reduce alcohol self-administration in rats. Male rats demonstrated a significant decrease in alcohol responding at all doses while responding for sucrose was reduced only at the highest dose. Similarly, there was a shift towards sucrose preference only at the highest dose tested. This choice procedure has potential as a streamlined approach for testing novel interventions for treatment of AUD.

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