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Sex differences in incentive motivation and the relationship to the development and maintenance of alcohol use disorders
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

Sex differences in incentive motivation and the relationship to the development and maintenance of alcohol use disorders

Jacqueline M Barker and Jane R Taylor
Physiology & behavior, v 203, pp 91-99
01 May 2019
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physbeh.2017.09.027
PMID: 28974459
Featured in Collection :   UN Sustainable Development Goals @ Drexel
url
https://europepmc.org/articles/pmc5878117View
Accepted (AM)Open Access (License Unspecified),  Open

Abstract

Alcohol Drinking - psychology Alcoholism - psychology Animals Behavior, Addictive - psychology Drug-Seeking Behavior - physiology Female Humans Male Motivation - physiology Reward Sex Characteristics
Despite considerable evidence of higher rates of alcohol use disorders (AUDs) in men than in women, there is a dearth of research into the underlying causes of this disparity. As the gap in high risk drinking between men and women closes, it is critical to disentangle the biological factors that may place men and women at different risk for the development of AUDs as well as AUD-associated health problems. While sex differences in alcohol drinking have been reported in animal models and in human alcoholics, it increasingly seems that consummatory behavior may be dissociated from propensity toward inflexible and cue-elicited drug seeking and taking that characterize alcohol use disorders. While much of this work was initially performed in males a growing, yet limited, body of literature suggests that there are sex differences in both cue reactivity, and further, the relationship between cue reactivity and the maintenance of addictive behavior, indicating that males may be at greater risk for the development of a subset of addiction-related behaviors independent of alcohol consumption. Here, we will review the current literature on sex effects on the relationship between incentive motivation and addictive behavior and discuss unanswered questions that we expect will inform the development of individualized and sex-specific treatment and prevention strategies for AUDs. We believe that a greater understanding of how sex interacts with in cue reactivity to independently mediate the drug taking and risk for the development of uncontrolled drug or alcohol-seeking and -taking will inform the development of individualized treatment and prevention strategies for addiction.

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33 citations in Web of Science
32 citations in Scopus

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UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

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#3 Good Health and Well-Being

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Collaboration types
Domestic collaboration
Web of Science research areas
Behavioral Sciences
Psychology, Biological
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