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Escalation Of Wheel Running: An Animal Model Of Non-Drug Addiction, Ali Gheidi

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Animal studies using the self-administration paradigm suggest that duration of drug access (Ahmed, 2005) and individual phenotype (Piazza, Deminiere, Le Moal and Simon, 1989) are important factors in the development of drug addiction. Wheel running in rats has been proposed as a model to study non-drug addictions (Eikelboom & Lattanzio, 2003). When first given ad lib wheel access, young male rats initially run at low levels (about 1000 wheel turns per night) and gradually increase this distance to high levels (about 5000 wheel turns per night) (Afonso and Eikelboom, 2003). Like with self-administration, duration of wheel access has been found …