“Dissecting limbic circuits for addiction and anxiety”

Kristen E. Pleil, Ph.D. Assistant Professor of Pharmacology, Weill Cornell Medicine My lab focuses on delineating the neural circuit mechanisms of addiction and comorbid neuropsychiatric disorders. Given the particularly high degree of coexpression between anxiety/mood disorders and addiction in women but the lack of fundamental knowledge about the underpinnings of these neuropsychiatric diseases in both sexes, we are especially focused on examining the sex-dependent organization and function of the neural circuits that regulate both stress responsivity and drug/alcohol consumption. Further, we are characterizing the plasticity that occurs in these overlapping synaptic nodes with repeated exposure to stressors that drives the expression of these behaviors to accelerate the development of disease states. Here, I will describe how a key neuropeptidergic circuit in the limbic system functions differently in male and female mice and how alterations in estrogen modulation of neuronal excitability and synaptic transmission in this circuit may be a driving factor for the development of multiple neuropsychiatric disease phenotypes.