ArticleNeuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology2015
Reducing Ventral Tegmental Dopamine D2 Receptor Expression Selectively Boosts Incentive Motivation.
Article in Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 58 papers.
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Who cites it
58 citing papers in PubMed, 74 citations in OpenAlex.
- Stressful life events are associated with striatal dopamine receptor availability in alcohol dependence.Journal of neural transmission (Vienna, Austria : 1996) · 2019Trial
- The effect of a dopamine antagonist on conditioning of sexual arousal in women.Psychopharmacology · 2016Trial
- Deletion of the sodium leak channel NALCN in dopamine neurons alters D2R-mediated signalling and psychostimulant responsiveness.The Journal of physiology · 2026Article
- Effort and substance use: differentiating tobacco use through reinforcement learning of effort based decision making.Journal of computational neuroscience · 2026Article
- Dopamine D2 receptors bypass canonical signaling to directly tune NMDA receptor function and aversive learning.Science advances · 2026Article
- Effort and Substance Use: Differentiating Tobacco Use Through Reinforcement Learning of Effort Based Decision Making.Research square · 2026Article
- The mesocorticolimbic system in stimulant use disorder.Molecular psychiatry · 2025Review
- Personality-based intergenerational effects of prenatal THC exposure in an inherited mouse model of social dominance and submissiveness.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Ventral tegmental area deep brain stimulation reverses ethanol-induced dopamine increase in the rat nucleus accumbens.Biomedical engineering letters · 2024Article
- Blunted sensitivity to expected value during risky decision making in individuals with problematic pornography use.Journal of behavioral addictions · 2024Article
- Toward Precise Modeling of Dopamine Release Kinetics: Comparison and Validation of Kinetic Models Using Voltammetry.ACS omega · 2024Article
- The influence of dopamine autoreceptors on temperament and addiction risk.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2023Review
- Amphetamines Improve the Motivation to Invest Effort in Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2023Article
- D1 receptor-expressing neurons in ventral tegmental area alleviate mouse anxiety-like behaviors via glutamatergic projection to lateral septum.Molecular psychiatry · 2023Article
- Pharmacological activation of the amygdala, but not single prolonged footshock-induced acute stress, interferes with cue-induced motivation toward food rewards in rats.Frontiers in behavioral neuroscience · 2023Article
- High frequency deep brain stimulation can mitigate the acute effects of cocaine administration on tonic dopamine levels in the rat nucleus accumbens.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2023Article
- The Modification of Offspring Stress-Related Behavior and the Expression ofInternational journal of molecular sciences · 2022Article
- Neurotensin Release from Dopamine Neurons Drives Long-Term Depression of Substantia Nigra Dopamine Signaling.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2022Article
- Increased elasticity of sucrose demand during hyperdopaminergic states in rats.Psychopharmacology · 2022Article
- Differential brain responses to alcohol-related and natural rewards are associated with alcohol use and problems: Evidence for reward dysregulation.Addiction biology · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
10 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Altered mesolimbic dopamine signaling has been widely implicated in addictive behavior. For the most part, this work has focused on dopamine within the striatum, but there is emerging evidence for a role of the auto-inhibitory, somatodendritic dopamine D2 receptor (D2R) in the ventral tegmental area (VTA) in addiction. Thus, decreased midbrain D2R expression has been implicated in addiction in humans. Moreover, knockout of the gene encoding the D2R receptor (Drd2) in dopamine neurons has been shown to enhance the locomotor response to cocaine in mice. Therefore, we here tested the hypothesis that decreasing D2R expression in the VTA of adult rats, using shRNA knockdown, promotes addiction-like behavior in rats responding for cocaine or palatable food. Rats with decreased VTA D2R expression showed markedly increased motivation for both sucrose and cocaine under a progressive ratio schedule of reinforcement, but the acquisition or maintenance of cocaine self-administration were not affected. They also displayed enhanced cocaine-induced locomotor activity, but no change in basal locomotion. This robust increase in incentive motivation was behaviorally specific, as we did not observe any differences in fixed ratio responding, extinction responding, reinstatement or conditioned suppression of cocaine, and sucrose seeking. We conclude that VTA D2R knockdown results in increased incentive motivation, but does not directly promote other aspects of addiction-like behavior.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.