Alcohol abuse research in rodents has focused on one particular pathway in the brain, the mesolimbic dopamine (DA) pathway that originates in the ventral tegmental area (VTA) and projects to the nucleus accumbens septi (NAcc; Dahlstrom and Fuxe, 1964). Due to the fact that ethanol increases DA in the NAcc as measured by in vivo microdialysis (Yoshimoto et al, 1992), examining ethanol’s impact on extracellular DA levels in adolescents would help determine whether DA mediates adolescent vulnerability to high ethanol consumption rates and alcohol dependency.
