The Addicted Synapse: Mechanisms of Synaptic and Structural Plasticity in Nucleus Accumbens

By S. Russo, D. Dietz, Dani Dumitriu, R. Malenka, E. Nestler. 2010

665 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Addictive drugs cause persistent restructuring of several neuronal cell types in the brain’s limbic regions thought to be responsible for long-term behavioral plasticity driving addiction. Although these structural changes are well documented in nucleus accumbens medium spiny neurons, little is known regarding the underlying molecular mechanisms. Additionally, it remains unclear whether structural plasticity and its synaptic concomitants drive addictive behaviors, or whether they reflect homeostatic compensations to the drug not related to addiction per se. Here, we discuss recent paradoxical data, which either support or oppose the hypothesis that drug-induced changes in dendritic spines drive addictive behavior. We define areas where future investigation can provide a more detailed picture of drug-induced synaptic reorganization, including ultrastructural, electrophysiological, and behavioral studies.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Physiology

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Citations in the corpus

Born to Learn: the Inspiration, Progress, and Future of Evolved Plastic Artificial Neural Networks (2017, background): “Biological plastic neural networks are also capable of structural plasticity, which creates new pathways among neurons (Lamprecht and LeDoux, 2004; Chklovskii et al., 2004; Russo et al., 2010): it occurs primarily during development, but there is evidence that it continues well into adulthood (Pascu”
Drug-evoked synaptic plasticity in addiction: from molecular changes to circuit remodeling (2011, background): “…drugs and how these may contribute to addictionrelated behaviors in rodent models have been the subject of a number of recent reviews (Kauer and Malenka, 2007; Thomas et al., 2008; Russo et al., 2010; Kalivas et al., 2009; Schmidt and Pierce, 2010; Wolf and Ferrario, 2010; Bowers et al., 2010).”
The Brain on Drugs: From Reward to Addiction. (2015, background): “Chronic cocaine increases dendritic spine density in MSNs (Russo et al., 2010), and DFosB is implicated in their generation (Maze et al.”