Early Life Adversity, Traits and Opioid Addiction
Date
2018-08-14
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract
Addiction has a negative impact on addicted individuals, their relationships and society at large. Though most adults have sampled addictive substances such as alcohol or prescription painkillers, only a small subset of them exhibit the chronic and relapsing drug use that characterizes addiction. Prior to compulsive and relapsing drug use, individuals will escalate their intake through increase dose or dose frequency. Given that escalation is the first hallmark of addiction to emerge, it is critical to the early detection of addiction. The increasing prevalence of synthetic and semi-synthetic opioids such as fentanyl is of critical concern as current treatments for opioid addiction are largely ineffective. Increasing focus on predisposing factors and early detection are essential to the prevention of opioid addiction. It is unknown what renders certain individuals more liable to develop addiction. Correlational research done in humans shows that there is a strong positive relationship between early life adversity and addiction prevalence in adulthood. The mechanism by which early life adversity impacts addiction vulnerability has not been well characterized. One way that early life adversity may increase the propensity to develop addiction is through the alteration of addiction-related behavioural traits. Several traits have been linked to addiction, namely impulsivity, novelty preference, anxiety and cue attraction. Human and rodent literature suggests that these traits are malleable and that stress during development can alter their expression. To date, no studies have experimentally examined the effects of early life adversity on the expression of addiction-related traits and self-administration behaviours in the same population. This thesis shows the first experimental evidence that early life adversity increases the prevalence of individuals expressing of multiple addiction risk traits as well as the number of individuals that escalate their opioid seeking and taking in a self-administration paradigm. Understanding the etiology of addiction and how early life stress augments the expression of addiction-related traits paves the way for the development of preventative interventions and knowing how early life adversity and addiction-related traits relate to the increased prevalence of opioid escalators will be beneficial to developing treatments for opioid addiction.
Description
Keywords
Citation
Zumbusch, A. S. (2018). Early life adversity, traits and opioid addiction (Master's thesis, University of Calgary, Calgary, Canada). Retrieved from https://prism.ucalgary.ca. doi:10.11575/PRISM/32817