Abstract
Alcohol use disorder (AUD) is a chronic and fatal disease. The main impediment of the AUD therapy is a high probability of relapse to alcohol abuse even after prolonged abstinence. The molecular mechanisms of cue-induced relapse are not well established, despite the fact that they may offer new targets for the treatment of AUD. Using a comprehensive animal model of AUD, virally-mediated and amygdala-targeted genetic manipulations by CRISPR/Cas9 technology and ex vivo electrophysiology, we identify a mechanism that selectively controls cue-induced alcohol relapse and AUD symptom severity. This mechanism is based on activity-regulated cytoskeleton-associated protein (Arc)/ARG3.1-dependent plasticity of the amygdala synapses. In humans, we identified single nucleotide polymorphisms in the ARC gene and their methylation predicting not only amygdala size, but also frequency of alcohol use, even at the onset of regular consumption. Targeting Arc during alcohol cue exposure may thus be a selective new mechanism for relapse prevention.
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Change history
05 December 2022
A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-022-01895-y
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Acknowledgements
This work has been supported by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement no 665735 (Bio4Med) and by the funding from Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education within 2016-2020 funds for the implementation of international projects (agreement no 3548/H2020/COFUND/2016/2) and National Science Center (Poland) Harmonia and Opus grants (UMO-2016/22/M/NZ4/00674 and UMO-2015/19/B/NZ4/03163) to KR. This work was further supported by the German National Science Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft [DFG]), grant MU 2789/8–2 and in part by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under the e:Med Program (031L0190B and 01KC2004B) and by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science KAKENHI grants (17H06312 and 19H03328). This work received support from the following sources: the European Union-funded FP6 Integrated Project IMAGEN (Reinforcement-related behavior in normal brain function and psychopathology) (LSHM-CT—2007-037286), the Horizon 2020 funded ERC Advanced Grant ‘STRATIFY’ (Brain network based stratification of reinforcement-related disorders) (695313), Human Brain Project (HBP SGA 2, 785907, and HBP SGA 3, 945539), the Medical Research Council Grant ‘c-VEDA’ (Consortium on Vulnerability to Externalizing Disorders and Addictions) (MR/N000390/1), the National Institute of Health (NIH) (R01DA049238, A decentralized macro and micro gene-by-environment interaction analysis of substance use behavior and its brain biomarkers), the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Biomedical Research Center at South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust and King’s College London, the Bundesministeriumfür Bildung und Forschung (BMBF grants 01GS08152; 01EV0711; Forschungsnetz AERIAL 01EE1406A, 01EE1406B; Forschungsnetz IMAC-Mind 01GL1745B), the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG grants SM 80/7-2, SFB 940, TRR 265, NE 1383/14-1), the Medical Research Foundation and Medical Research Council (grants MR/R00465X/1 and MR/S020306/1), the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funded ENIGMA (grants 5U54EB020403-05 and 1R56AG058854-01), NSFC grant 82150710554 and environMENTAL grant. Further support was provided by grants from:—the ANR (ANR-12-SAMA-0004, AAPG2019—GeBra), the Eranet Neuron (AF12-NEUR0008-01—WM2NA; and ANR-18-NEUR00002-01-ADORe), the Fondation de France (00081242), the Fondation pour la Recherche Médicale (DPA20140629802), the Mission Interministérielle de Lutte-contre-les-Drogues-et-les-Conduites-Addictives (MILDECA), the Assistance-Publique-Hôpitaux-de-Paris and INSERM (interface grant), Paris Sud University IDEX 2012, the Fondation de l’Avenir (grant AP-RM-17-013), the Fédération pour la Recherche sur le Cerveau; the National Institutes of Health, Science Foundation Ireland (16/ERCD/3797), U.S.A. (Axon, Testosterone and Mental Health during Adolescence; RO1 MH085772-01A1) and by NIH Consortium grant U54 EB020403, supported by a cross-NIH alliance that funds Big Data to Knowledge Centers of Excellence. ImagenPathways “Understanding the Interplay between Cultural, Biological and Subjective Factors in Drug Use Pathways” is a collaborative project supported by the European Research Area Network on Illicit Drugs (ERANID). This paper is based on independent research commissioned and funded in England by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Policy Research Program (project ref. PR-ST-0416-10001. The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and not necessarily those of the national funding agencies or ERANID.
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KR initiated the studies, designed experiments, supervised and coordinated research; RP, AS, ES, AB, MNS, AC and KR performed and analyzed mouse studies; HO, HB and KK provided materials and supervised in vitro experiments; IMAGEN consortium, NT, JZ, GS and CPM analyzed human data. RP, CPM, GS and KR wrote the paper. All authors discussed the results and commented on the paper.
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TB served in an advisory or consultancy role for eye level, Infectopharm, Lundbeck, Medice, Neurim Pharmaceuticals, Oberberg GmbH, Roche, and Takeda. He received conference support or speaker’s fee by Janssen, Medice and Takeda. He received royalities from Hogrefe, Kohlhammer, CIP Medien, Oxford University Press; the present work is unrelated to these relationships. Dr Barker has received honoraria from General Electric Healthcare for teaching on scanner programming courses. LP served in an advisory or consultancy role for Roche and Viforpharm and received a speaker’s fee from Shire. She received royalties from Hogrefe, Kohlhammer and Schattauer. The present work is unrelated to the above grants and relationships. The other authors report no biomedical financial interests or potential competing interests.
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Pagano, R., Salamian, A., Zielinski, J. et al. Arc controls alcohol cue relapse by a central amygdala mechanism. Mol Psychiatry 28, 733–745 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-022-01849-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-022-01849-4
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