Rajeswari Koyyada, Nilesh Latchooman, Julius Jonaitis, Samir S. Ayoub, Olivia Corcoran, Stefano O. Casalotti
Abstract
Alcohol use disorder (AUD) is a major health, social and economic problem for which there are few effective treatments. The opiate antagonist naltrexone is currently prescribed clinically with mixed success. We have used naltrexone in an established behavioral assay (CAFE) in Drosophila melanogaster that measures the flies' preference for ethanol-containing food. We have confirmed that Drosophila exposed to ethanol develop a preference toward this drug and we demonstrate that naltrexone, in a dose dependant manner, reverses the ethanol-induced ethanol preference. This effect is not permanent, as preference for alcohol returns after discontinuing naltrexone. Additionally, naltrexone reduced the alcohol-induced increase in protein kinase C activity. These findings are of interest because they confirm that Drosophila is a useful model for studying human responses to addictive drugs. Additionally because of the lack of a closely conserved opiate system in insects, our results could either indicate that a functionally related system does exist in insects or that in insects, and potentially also in mammals, naltrexone binds to alternative sites. Identifying such sites could lead to improved treatment strategies for AUD.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 2. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 19 March 2018.
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#13,886,273
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#179,235
of 333,763 outputs
Outputs of similar age from Frontiers in Physiology
#158
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Altmetric has tracked 23,028,364 research outputs across all sources so far. This one is in the 39th percentile – i.e., 39% of other outputs scored the same or lower than it.
So far Altmetric has tracked 13,775 research outputs from this source. They typically receive more attention than average, with a mean Attention Score of 7.6. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 64% of its peers.
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We're also able to compare this research output to 406 others from the same source and published within six weeks on either side of this one. This one has gotten more attention than average, scoring higher than 61% of its contemporaries.
