118— Environmental Enrichment as a Treatment for Cocaine Relapse

Cocaine addiction is a problem for millions of people, however we are still lacking an effective treatment. It is characterized by compulsive behaviour which marks difficulties in remaining abstinent, with a high risk of relapse. Here, I focus on the interaction between the post-drug environment and drug-seeking by testing one potential environmental treatment, an enriched environment (EE), to reduce risk of cocaine relapse. This study proposes to investigate neural circuits involved in environmental protection of context-induced relapse. Mice exposed to cocaine will be assessed for preference of a cocaine-associated context using the conditioned place preference (CPP) paradigm. Mice will then be housed in either standard or EE cages for 2 weeks of withdrawal, before being returned to the CPP chamber for a test of context-induced relapse. I hypothesize that EE will reduce cocaine relapse, an outcome associated with the changes in activation in brain regions related to reward and addiction.