Analysis Of Drug Addiction Vulnerability And Investigation Of The Effect Of Chloral Hydrate To Treat Methamphetamine Addiction

Drug addiction is an intractable chronic neuropsychiatric disorder that raises serious social problems.Drug abuse is becoming a worldwide problem due to the COVID-19 epidemic and various socio-economic reasons,and solving these drug abuse problems is difficult.Because of this reason,research on drug addiction has practical implications for individual health and social stability.The research content of this article includes two parts,drug addiction vulnerability research,and drug addiction treatment modalities.Because drug addiction vulnerability varies among individuals,addiction vulnerability research has important implications for the study of drug addiction mechanisms and evaluating an individual’s addiction risk.On the one hand,we evaluated the effects of social hierarchy on the susceptibility to methamphetamine addiction by analyzing the differences in the rewarding effects of methamphetamine in rats with different social rank.On the other hand,we explored the correlation between hair regeneration ability and drug addiction susceptibility in rats by Pearson correlation analysis.We evaluate the hair regrowth ability by gray-scale analysis and assess the addiction susceptibility with conditioned place preference and intravenous selfadministration paradigm in rats.The results showed the reward effect of methamphetamine on rats of lower social grade was higher than that of rats of higher social grade,suggesting that rats of the lower social grade had a higher risk of drug addiction.Meanwhile,we revealed a significant negative correlation between addiction vulnerability and hair regrowth ability.The rats with fast hair regrowth speed exhibited less CPP score and reduced drug-seeking behavior in the methamphetamine selfadministration model.The open-field test showed no differences in locomotor activity and anxiety level between the two groups.And then,because of the issue that there are currently no effective treatments for methamphetamine addiction,we found that chloral hydrate,a clinical sedative drug,has the potential to control methamphetamine addiction.We found that chloral hydrate treatment（100 mg/kg,5 consecutive days.）significantly inhibited methamphetamineassociated memory as measured by conditioned place preference,and reduce the number of methamphetamine self-administration.And this inhibitory effect persisted for 22 days after the last chloral hydrate administration.To avoid the sedative effects of chloral hydrate,we evaluated the side effects of chloral hydrate using sucrose selfadministration and open-field tests.The results showed that chloral hydrate treatment did not significantly affect the locomotor activity and the ability to acquire physiological rewards in rats at this dose of chloral hydrate.Therefore,chloral hydrate may have an inhibitory effect on drug seeking behaviors triggered by methamphetamine addiction..Above all,on the one hand,our founding may help predict drug addiction risk from this phenotypic difference and provide a new perspective for drug addiction vulnerability research.On the other hand,based on the research ideas of new uses of old drugs,we explored the efficacy and achieved positive results of chloral hydrate,a classical clinical sedative drug,for methamphetamine addiction,and suggested possible intervention means for clinical treatment of methamphetamine drug addiction.