Behaviours such as eating, copulating, defending oneself or taking addictive drugs begin
with a motivation to initiate the behaviour. Both this motivational drive and the behaviours …

Drug addiction represents a dramatic dysregulation of motivational circuits that is caused by
a combination of exaggerated incentive salience and habit formation, reward deficits and …

Dopamine (DA) plays multiple roles in a wide range of physiological and pathological
processes via a large network of dopaminergic projections. To dissect the spatiotemporal …

Advances in neuroscience identified addiction as a chronic brain disease with strong
genetic, neurodevelopmental, and sociocultural components. We here discuss the circuit …

The nucleus accumbens is a major input structure of the basal ganglia and integrates
information from cortical and limbic structures to mediate goal-directed behaviors. Chronic …

Sex/gender effects have been demonstrated for multiple aspects of addiction, with one of the
most commonly cited examples being the “telescoping effect” where women meet criteria …

AMPA receptors (AMPARs) are assemblies of four core subunits, GluA1–4, that mediate
most fast excitatory neurotransmission. The component subunits determine the functional …

Addiction is a disease in which, after a period of recreational use, a subset of individuals
develops compulsive use that does not stop even in light of major negative consequences …

Vulnerability to relapse during periods of attempted abstinence from cocaine use is
hypothesized to result from the rewiring of brain reward circuitries, particularly ventral …

Cocaine use disorder (CUD) is an intractable syndrome, and rising overdose death rates
represent a substantial public health crisis that exacts tremendous personal and financial …