Abstract

Maladaptive associations are fundamentally involved in drug addiction and relapse. Different therapies exist to combat these associations in order to decrease the burden of addiction. One potential non-pharmacological approach is prolonged exposure (extinction) therapy, however, this is inefficacious for addiction. A new approach may be provided by ‘extinction within the reconsolidation window’ or ‘retrieval-extinction’, in which a temporally isolated retrieval session shortly before extinction can strengthen its effect and thus decrease relapse. Currently, it is unknown whether this retrieval session affects the memory updating reconsolidation or enhances the novel negative competing extinction memory. We sought to examine the underlying mechanism in a behavioural rat model of cocaine addiction undergoing retrieval-extinction. In order to test if retrieval-extinction depends on reconsolidation or extinction, we targeted the unique destabilisation phase of reconsolidation with administration of nimodipine, an L-type Voltage Gated Calcium Channel inhibitor.