Insula function is considered critical for many motivated behaviors, with proposed functions
ranging from attention, behavioral control, emotional regulation, goal-directed and aversion …

Excessive alcohol use curtails longevity by rendering intoxicated individuals vulnerable to
heightened risk from accidents, violence, and alcohol poisoning, and makes chronically …

Childhood adversity is associated with altered or dysregulated stress reactivity; these altered
patterns of physiological functioning persist into adulthood. Evidence from both preclinical …

Aims Maintaining abstinence from alcohol use disorder (AUD) is extremely challenging,
partially due to increased symptoms of anxiety and stress that trigger relapse. Rodent …

The sexually dimorphic bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST) is comprised of several
distinct regions, some of which act as a hub for stress-induced changes in neural circuitry …

The ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) to nucleus accumbens (NAc) circuit has been
implicated in impulsive reward-seeking. This disinhibition has been implicated in obesity …

Background Anxiety during early alcohol abstinence, likely resulting from neural changes
caused by chronic alcohol use, contributes to high relapse rates. Studies in rodents show …

Alcohol use disorder is a complex psychiatric disorder that can be modeled in rodents using
a number of drinking paradigms. Drinking-in-the-dark (DID) is widely used to model the …

Women are drinking alcohol as much as men for the first time in history. Women experience
more health-related consequences from alcohol use disorder (AUD), like increased …

Invasive tract-tracing studies in rodents implicate a direct connection between the subiculum
and bed nucleus of the stria terminalis (BNST) as a key component of neural pathways …