Repeated exposure to psychomotor stimulants produce long-term changes in behavior ranging from addiction to behavioral sensitization. Many of these behaviors depend on the nigrostriatal system of the basal ganglia. We show here that chronic cocaine exposure not only leads to time-varying alterations in the inducibility of bZIP transcription factors in individual striatal neurons, but also to lo...

Repeated haloperidol and olanzapine treatment produces an enhanced disruption of avoidance responding, a validated measure of antipsychotic activity. Experimental parameters affecting this sensitization-like effect have not been thoroughly examined. The present study investigated the role of three parameters (number of injections, dose, and interval between initial exposure and challenge) in an...

Peripheral inflammation causes mechanical pain behavior and increased action potential firing. However, most studies examine inflammatory pain at acute, rather than chronic time points, despite the greater burden of chronic pain on patient populations, especially aged individuals. Furthermore, there is disagreement in the field about whether primary afferents contribute to chronic pain. Therefo...

Repeated administration of apomorphine leads to a context-dependent pecking response sens iti zation . Previously sens itized pigeons (Co /llmba /ivia) challenged with saline in the same context show a conditioned response (CR) . The authors studied the effects of intra striatal inj ections of the dopamine (D, ) antagonist SCH-23390 on both the sensiti zed response and the C R. When coadministc...