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novapsycheStudies Find Rats Can Get Hooked on Drugs
Rats can become drug addicts. That's important to know, scientists say, and has taken a long time to prove. Now two studies by French and British researchers show the animals exhibit the same compulsive drive for cocaine as people do once they're truly hooked.
[...] Among the ways to know when a rat's hooked: It keeps trying to get cocaine even when each hit comes with an electric shock.
In the French study, rats poked their pointy noses through holes in their cages to trigger injections of cocaine. They were allowed access to the cocaine for three months, much longer than the 10- to 30-day drug-use studies normally done with animals.
Compulsive drug-seeking even in the face of bad consequences is a measure of human addiction. So the researchers devised ways to measure that in animals: routinely cutting off the drug supply and measuring the rats' persistence at poking the supply trigger anyway, seeing how hard they worked to get the drug and noting whether they gave up when their feet were shocked.
Intriguingly, 17 percent of the rats met all three measures and thus were considered addicted — while roughly 15 percent of human cocaine users become addicts, reported lead researcher Pier Vincenzo Piazza of INSERM, France's National Institute of Health and Medical Research.
Rats can become drug addicts. That's important to know, scientists say, and has taken a long time to prove. Now two studies by French and British researchers show the animals exhibit the same compulsive drive for cocaine as people do once they're truly hooked.
[...] Among the ways to know when a rat's hooked: It keeps trying to get cocaine even when each hit comes with an electric shock.
In the French study, rats poked their pointy noses through holes in their cages to trigger injections of cocaine. They were allowed access to the cocaine for three months, much longer than the 10- to 30-day drug-use studies normally done with animals.
Compulsive drug-seeking even in the face of bad consequences is a measure of human addiction. So the researchers devised ways to measure that in animals: routinely cutting off the drug supply and measuring the rats' persistence at poking the supply trigger anyway, seeing how hard they worked to get the drug and noting whether they gave up when their feet were shocked.
Intriguingly, 17 percent of the rats met all three measures and thus were considered addicted — while roughly 15 percent of human cocaine users become addicts, reported lead researcher Pier Vincenzo Piazza of INSERM, France's National Institute of Health and Medical Research.
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and
Date: 2004-08-13 01:53 pm (UTC)it works on humans very well, but it was really surprising to see it work on a lower animal,,,
one dose = no more addiction, and 3 years later only 40 % recidivism.