Erasing memories of cocaine-stimuli associations might have important clinical implications for addiction therapy. Stimulating hippocampal plasticity by enhancing adult hippocampal neurogenesis (AHN) is a promising strategy because the addition of new neurons may not only facilitate new learning but also modify previous connections and weaken retrograde memories. To investigate whether increasing AHN prompted the forgetting of previous contextual cocaine associations, mice trained in a cocaine-induced conditioned place preference (CPP) paradigm were administered chronic intracerebroventricular infusions of lysophosphatidic acid (LPA, an endogenous lysophospholipid with pro-neurogenic actions), ki16425 (a LPA1/3 receptor antagonist), or a vehicle solution, and they were tested 23 days later for CPP retention and extinction. The results of immunohistochemical experiments showed that the LPA-treated mice exhibited reduced long-term CPP retention and an
~two-fold increase in the number of adult-born hippocampal cells that differentiated into mature neurons. Importantly, mediation analyses confirmed a causal role of AHN in reducing CPP maintenance. In contrast, the ki16425-treated mice displayed aberrant responses, with initially decreased CPP retention that progressively increased across the extinction sessions, leading to no effect on AHN. The pharmacological treatments did not affect locomotion or general exploratory or anxiety-like responses. In a second experiment, normal and LPA1 receptor-deficient mice were acutely infused with LPA, which revealed that LPA1-mediated signaling was required for LPA-induced proliferative actions. These results suggest that the LPA/LPA1-pathway acts as a potent in vivo modulator of AHN and highlight the potential usefulness of pro-AHN strategies to treat aberrant cognition in those addicted to cocaine.
