Dual Diagnosis

Biography

Alcohol addiction is a very complex psychiatric disease with psychological, behavioural and somatic components. For two decades I am working on animal models of excessive alcohol drinking and alcohol addiction in order to decipher neurobiological bases of the pathology and to find new therapeutics. As addiction is considered as a pathological memory process we investigate synaptic plasticity changes and real time measurement of dopamine transmission to challenge current hypotheses of addiction. My lab has now set up an original model of binge drinking in rat using an ethanol operant self-administration procedure and the gold standard to investigate addictive behaviour. In the latter model rodents are made dependent upon alcohol and display both physical and psychological signs of dependence. In this model the vulnerability to develop the more servere phenotype of dependence is explored. We are also interested by investigating the pathophysiology of alcoholic liver disease. An important question is also the long term impact of early life ethanol exposure (in utero and adolescence) on brain functioning and vulnerability to addiction. We use both clinical and preclinical studies to answer this question. Recently we have also set up an animal model of the comorbidity schizophrenia-alcohol abuse in order to investigate the neurobiological bases of the comorbidity.

Research Interest

Physiologie Addictologie, Neurosciences Neuropsychopharmacologie