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Serotonergic receptor subtypes and hallucinogen-induced stimulus control.

Jerrold C Winter, David Fiorella, D M Timineri, R A Filipink, Scott Helsley, R A Rabin

Pharmacology, biochemistry, and behavior October 1999 DOI: 10.1016/s0091-3057(99)00063-5 (opens in new tab)

Study at a glance

AI-extracted from the abstract
Characteristics Review Peer reviewed
Topics Serotonin
Key findings Argues that hallucinogens produce compound discriminative stimuli through actions at multiple serotonin receptors, with the salience of each component modulated by training dose, pretreatment time, sensitization state, and generalization test drugs.

Abstract

More than a quarter century has passed since the demonstration that indoleamine and phenethylamine hallucinogens can function as discriminative stimuli in the rat, and that serotonergic systems are critically involved. During that period our knowledge of the physiology, pharmacology, biochemistry, and molecular biology of serotonergic receptors has increased exponentially; with each advance it has been necessary to reexamine our assumptions regarding hallucinogen-induced stimulus control. Of particular interest is the hypothesis that a drug may act, at a molecular level, upon multiple receptors to produce, at a behavioral level, a compound discriminative stimulus. The salience of the individual elements of such compound stimuli may be influenced by a variety of experimental factors including training dose, pretreatment time, the state of sensitization of the systems being acted upon, and the nature of the drugs chosen for tests of generalization. This article provides examples of experimental approaches to these complexities using selective agonists and antagonists, depletion-induced sensitization, and antagonist correlation analysis.