Incentive salience drives escalation of cocaine self-administration in heterogeneous stock rats

There are a number of theories that have been studied to try to explain addiction and drug use escalation, and thus to also create animal models of that behavior that can then serve to help develop treatments. One theory for escalation is that people feel worse and worse over time and so they take the drug to feel better. Another is that they just don’t get as much of a reaction to the drug and so need more and more of it to get the euphoria. And then there’s something called incentive salience, which is a craving for the drug. Read the full study here: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41386-026-02350-0