The lab recently published a paper in the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, led by graduate student Chris O’Brien along with support from undergraduate students Roshni Vemireddy and Uzma Mohammed.

In the paper, we use a large battery of behavioral tests to determine the types of behavioral predictors that might indicate which individuals are most prone to opioid abuse after taking opioids across a window of time similar to a prescription. As a part of this, we also examined the influence of individual history, examining how traumatic stress might change the relevant predictors. We discovered that a susceptibility to negative mood states was a key predictor in control mice, and that the phenotype shifted following traumatic stress, such that mice who developed paradoxically high reward seeking and low thresholds for pain were those most likely to exhibit heightened drug-seeking.

Our findings provide some key messages for thinking about patients at risk in clinical settings, suggesting that targeted testing or questions could provide insights into the individuals at the greatest risk for future opioid abuse.