Conditioned Place Preference - Extinction and Reinstatement Procedures - Relapse

Relapse

Research on stress and drug-primed reinstatement has implications for treatment of addiction research in humans. Reinstatement studies on stress and drug primes provide evidence for their role in relapse behavior in humans. In addition to conditioned placed preference, animal testing using self-administration procedures have also been used to examine potential causes of relapse in humans. Stress and drug-primes have also shown to contribute to relapse behaviour in humans. With the knowledge that stress and drug primes contribute to relapse behavior, measures to avoid stressful situations can help addicts avoid returning to their addictive behaviors. Drug Priming is thought to induce relapse in humans because of their effects on the reward circuits of the brain. Repeated drug exposure is thought to sensitize the rewarding effect of the drug and exposure to the drug after extinction can reintroduce this rewarding effect. These effects play a key role in the persistence of drug-seeking behaviors. Researchers use the reinstatement procedure to test the ability of certain drugs to inhibit these different types of reinstatement. One such drug that has been shown to have attenuating effects on reinstatement is mecamylamine. This is a selective nicotinic acetylcholine receptor antagonist which, if administered after extinction trials, can block the reinstatement of the conditioned place preference for nicotine and opiates. Although direct causal linkages cannot be assumed between reinstatement in the conditioned place preference procedure and relapse in humans, it provides a solid first step in the process of creating drugs that may one day be used to treat relapse in humans.