Papers of the Week

Alcohol is the most ubiquitously consumed and misused mind-altering substance in the world. Various animal models exist to aid in our neurobiological understanding of alcohol addiction. One variable too often taken for granted and not consistently controlled is the "standard" chow diet rodents are maintained on. In this set of experiments, we sought to determine the effect of different commonly used diets on ethanol intake, ethanol preference, and mechanical pain sensitivity in a widely used mouse model of heavy alcohol drinking, the intermittent access to 20% alcohol model. We found that male mice kept on LabDiet 5001 (Diet 2 (LD5001)) and on Teklad Diet 7012 (Diet 3 (H7012)) consistently drank more ethanol than mice kept on Teklad Diet 2918 (Diet 1 (H2918)) as well as compared to mice on LabDiet 5V75 (Diet 4 (LD5V75)). In addition, water intake was consistently lower in mice kept on LabDiet 5001 (Diet 2 (LD5001)), and occasionally in mice kept on Teklad Diet 7012 (Diet 3 (H7012)), compared to the Teklad Diet 2918 (Diet 1 (H2918)) group. We found that male mice showed a strong mechanical allodynia following 8 weeks of intermittent ethanol drinking at 72 hr of withdrawal, compared to water Control mice, regardless of the diet and hence of the different amount of ethanol consumed. Our data provide evidence that the type of rodent diet subject are exposed to is an important variable to report and control, in all ethanol drinking studies.