Neural signaling of methamphetamine craving and seeking intensified by bupropion in the ventral tegmental area-cortico-accumbens circuitry in mice

ANet: Autoencoder-Based Local Field Potential Feature Extractor for Evaluating an Antidepressant Effect in Mice After Administering Kratom Leaf Extracts

Kratom (KT) typically exerts antidepressant (AD) effects. However, evaluating which form of KT extracts possesses AD properties similar to the standard AD fluoxetine (flu) remained challenging. Here, we adopted an autoencoder (AE)-based anomaly detector called ANet to measure the similarity of mice's local field potential (LFP) features that responded to KT leave extracts and AD flu. The features that responded to KT syrup had the highest similarity to those that responded to the AD flu at 87.11 ± 0.25%. This finding presents the higher feasibility of using KT syrup as an alternative substance for depressant therapy than KT alkaloids and KT aqueous, which are the other candidates in this study. Apart from the similarity measurement, we utilized ANet as a multi-task AE and evaluated the performance in discriminating multi-class LFP responses corresponding to the effect of different KT extracts and AD flu simultaneously. Furthermore, we visualized learned latent features among LFP responses qualitatively and quantitatively as t-SNE projection and maximum mean discrepancy distance, respectively. The classification results reported the accuracy and F1-score of 90.11 ± 0.11% and 90.08 ± 0.00%. In summary, the outcomes of this research might help therapeutic design devices for an alternative substance profile evaluation, such as Kratom-based form, in real-world applications.

A 1:1 ratio of cannabidiol: tetrahydrocannabinol attenuates methamphetamine conditioned place preference in mice: A prospective study of antidopaminergic mechanism

A 1:1 ratio of cannabidiol to tetrahydrocannabinol (CT) was suggested to be safer for therapeutic purposes in many illnesses. However, CT effects on methamphetamine (METH) conditioned place preference (CPP) remained largely unexplored. This study aimed to examine the effects of CT on METH CPP mice evaluated by animal behaviors accompanied by local field potential (LFP) signals analysis. Male ICR mice were implanted with the LFP electrode in the ventral tegmental area (VTA) and the nucleus accumbens (NAc). Animals were next subjected to induce METH CPP by peritoneal injection with 1 mg/kg METH and 0.9 % NaCl on an alternate day for ten sessions and confined to the corresponding compartment for 30 min meanwhile control mice were given normal saline all day for both compartments. On testing day, either 10 mg/kg CT or 20 mg/kg bupropion (BP), a dopamine reuptake inhibitor, and VTA GABAergic suppressor were orally administered before CPP testing. The results revealed that CPP scores elevation was observed in the METH+vehicle and METH+BP mice, but this was reversed by CT treatment. Although both METH+vehicle and METH+BP enhanced the VTA delta power, NAc gamma I power, NAc delta-gamma coupling, and VTA-NAc gamma I coherence, changes in opposite trends of all mentioned parameters were seen by CT application. These improvements were postulated to involve the antidopaminergic effects of CT via modulations of neural signaling in the VTA and NAc. Altogether, the evidence-based study may suggest the use of CT as alternative drug for METH-seeking and craving therapy.