Incubation of social deficit during morphine abstinence in male mice using a novel unbiased and automatized method

Face of the global opioid addiction epidemic and the frequent relapses observed after withdrawal, understanding the brain and behavioral mechanisms of abstinence has become a major public health challenge. The work of Victor MATHIS and Emmanuel DARCQ addresses this issue by exploring how opioid withdrawal alters social behaviors using a mouse model. We employed an innovative automated analysis system — the Live Mouse Tracker — to monitor, over several weeks, social interactions between mice following morphine treatment.

We show that while motor exploration deficits disappear rapidly, social difficulties emerge gradually and peak three weeks after morphine cessation.
These findings highlight the importance of innovative, automated, and objective tracking tools to better understand the emotional and social disturbances associated with opioid dependence.