ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Behav. Neurosci.
Sec. Motivation and Reward
Volume 19 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fnbeh.2025.1697469
This article is part of the Research TopicRethinking addiction: Technological advances, mechanistic insights, and the re-evaluation of substance use disordersView all articles
Incubation of social deficit during morphine abstinence in male mice using a novel unbiased and automatized method
Provisionally accepted- 1INSERM-UMR-S1329, UMRS1329 Strasbourg Translational Neuroscience and Psychiatry, University of Strasbourg, Strasbourg, France
- 2Institut de Genetique et de Biologie Moleculaire et Cellulaire Institut Clinique de la Souris, Illkirch, France
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Opioid use disorder (OUD) is a chronic relapsing condition caused by prolonged opioid exposure, which triggers adaptive changes in the brain. These changes make it challenging to control or abstain from consuming, and significantly increase the risk of relapse. While the physical symptoms of withdrawal typically resolve within a few days, extended abstinence is frequently accompanied by the progressive development of emotional disturbances. Additionally, abstinent individuals often report social disengagement, or even social isolation that worsen the condition and participates in the development of comorbidities. These disturbances are similarly observed in murine models of opioid abstinence. However, traditional methods for assessing social deficits in rodents often rely on simplistic paradigms with limited behavioral metrics. Here, we utilized a well-established model of morphine administration followed by protracted abstinence, combined with the Live Mouse Tracker (LMT) system. Using the real-time video-based automated LMT system, we conducted longitudinal recordings of social behaviors over a 4-week period of morphine abstinence, during repeated social interaction sessions. The use of this method, offering an unbiased and precise behavioral characterization of social investigation between freely-moving male mice, revealed that while motor and activity-related disruptions emerge and resolve quickly immediately following the onset of abstinence, social deficits progressively intensify over time, reaching their peak three weeks after the final morphine administration. Additionally, the LMT provided detailed insights into subtle behavioral changes throughout the course of abstinence and within individual but also that early deficits in explorations and social interactions might serve as predictor for the severity of the late social deficits. These results point out the need to improve and implement unbiased tracking methods for a deeper and refined understanding of rodent behaviors modeling psychiatric conditions.
Keywords: opioid, protracted abstinence, social deficits, withdrawal, Morphine
Received: 02 Sep 2025; Accepted: 06 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Mathis, Giua, Torquet, Mittelhaeuser, Bour, Kieffer, Riet and Darcq. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Victor Philippe Mathis, victor.mathis@dbmail.com
Emmanuel Darcq, edarcq@unistra.fr
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