It is well known that individuals, who have primary mental disorder (for instance depression, schizophrenia) use alcohol for self medication purposes. Furthermore, there is plenty of evidence that individuals, who have alcohol addiction, during the abstinence develop secondary psychiatric illness.
In this case mental illness can be explained by neuradaptations in the brain elicited by chronic intoxication with alcohol. Another explanation would be that comorbid disorders – alcoholism and depression – are due to common genetical predisposition to develop mental disorders. Therefore the precise mechanism and genetic vulnerbility is not clear in this case. Consequently, our research team purpose is to elucidate the overlapping mechanims of those two psychiatric disorders in order to suggest the potential treatment strategies. First of all, we will develop preclinical rat models of depression and alcoholism disorders. For this purpose we will use behavioural and pharmacological models.
Behavioural disease models are created by manipulating animal environmental conditions (chronic intermittent alcohol use will cause addiction), and pharmacological model which uses drugs, affecting nervous system function and/or develpmental processes (neonatal clomipramine treatment will induce depressive symptomatology among adult rats). Animal models of mental disorder will be validated using behavioural methods (for instance, Porsolt test, USV vocalisations, sucrose solution test for anhedonia). Later, we will perform electrophysiological and neurochemical measurements in order to get the more detailed picture about pathophysiological changes observed in those two mental disorders.
