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If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. Biological factors are known to influence disease trajectories and treatment effectiveness in alcohol addiction and preclinical and clinical evidence suggests that sex is an important factor influencing disease dynamics in alcohol dependence.
Another critical factor is age at first intoxicating drink, which has been identified as a risk factor for later alcohol binging. Preclinical research allows prospective monitoring of rodents throughout the lifespan, providing very detailed information that cannot be acquired in humans. Lifetime monitoring in rodents can be conducted under highly controlled conditions, during which one can systematically introduce multiple biological and environmental factors that impact behaviors of interest.
Here, we used the alcohol deprivation effect ADE rat model of alcohol addiction in a computerized drinkometer system, acquiring high-resolution data to study changes over the course of addictive behavior as well as compulsive-like drinking in cohorts of adolescent vs. Increased consumption in females compared to males was driven by larger access sizes of alcohol. Differences in circadian patterns of movement were observed between groups.
Early age of onset of drinking postnatal day 40 in male rats had surprisingly little impact on the development of drinking behavior and compulsivity quinine taste adulteration when compared to rats that started drinking during early adulthood postnatal day Our results suggest that there are sex-specific drinking patterns, not only in terms of total amount consumed, but specifically in terms of solution preference and access size.
