A growing body of preclinical evidence suggests that OXT administration is effective in attenuating reinstatement of alcohol/drug seeking to conditioned cues, a drug prime, or stress. For example, systemic injection of OXT has been shown to reduce drug-primed reinstatement in models investigating heroin (Georgiou et al., 2015), cocaine (Zhou et al., 2014), and methamphetamine (Baracz et al., 2012, Carson et al., 2010a, Cox et al., 2017, Cox et al., 2013) relapse-related behaviors. In regard to cued reinstatement, systemic OXT decreased reinvigoration of drug-seeking behavior (lever responding) for cocaine (Bentzley et al., 2014, Leong et al., 2017) and methamphetamine (Bernheim et al., 2017) provoked by stimuli previously associated with drug reward. Similar results were found when OXT was administered centrally. More specifically, icv. infusion of OXT reduced cue-induced reinstatement of cocaine-seeking behavior in both male (Morales-Rivera et al., 2014) and female rats (Leong et al., 2016). Likewise, direct infusion of OXT into NAc (Weber et al., 2018) and the subthalamic nucleus (STN), a downstream projection of the NAc (Leong et al., 2017), attenuated cocaine-seeking behavior. Both peripheral and central (icv) administration
