Sun. Oct 13, 2019 10:30 AM - 12:10 PM Room 4 (409)

Organizer / Chair: ‌Jin-Chung CHEN (Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, Graduate Institute of Biomedical Sciences, Chang Gung University, Taiwan), Co-chair: Hidehiko TAKAHASHI (Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Tokyo Medical and Dental University, Japan), Discussant: ‌Tomohisa MORI (Department of Pharmacology, Hoshi University, Japan)

Stimulant abuse and addiction represents one of the most significant issues in public health. Currently, no medications or replacement therapy can effectively reduce drug craving or prevent relapse. Integration from clinical and animal research would advance our understanding of the etiological processes and facilitate the development of better therapeutic strategies. In this symposium, we organized four oral reports covering novel findings in cocaine and methamphetamine (METH) addiction and animal models of extinction and relapse. First, the hypothalamus contains dopaminergic neuronal groups and has been widely implicated in motivated behavior. It is likely that the hypothalamic circuit plays an important role in the clinical manifestations and etiological processes of cocaine addiction. Dr. Li CS explores how the hypothalamus may be involved in cue induced craving in relation to addiction severity in abstinent chronic cocaine users. Second, METH can cause psychosis that closely resembles the symptoms observed in schizophrenia, making the differential diagnosis very challenging. Dr. Huang MC examines the distinct resting-state functional connectivity patterns characterizing individuals with METH-induced persistent psychosis in comparison to age-, gender-, and education-matched METH abusers with brief psychosis, those with no psychosis, schizophrenia patients and healthy controls. Next, prefrontal glutamate is known to deliver a powerful extinction signal to extinguish the aversive memory. To explore if prefrontal glutamate projection would play a similar role in appetitive extinction, Dr. Chen JC applies optogenetics on vGluT2-Cre and parvalbumin-Cre mice and tests if photo-manipulation of frontal glutamate or ventral tegmental area GABA neural activity could modulate extinction memory in a METH-conditioned place preference (CPP) mice model. Finally, acupuncture has been successfully used to treat drug addiction since the 1970s. However, the mechanism of acupuncture in drug addiction has not been clarified. MS graduate student, Nguyen Ai TM presents her recent study exploring the effect of electroacupuncture (EA) at acupoints LI4 and LI11 on the reinstatement of cocaine-induced CPP, as well as c-Fos and ΔFosB protein expression in the nucleus accumbens after EA treatment. The findings suggest that EA at LI4 and LI11 may help in preventing cocaine relapse and could be considered as a formula for acupuncture treatment in cocaine addiction.