they had undergone repeated reward-pairing, having learned to associate the side-specific sensory stimuli with reward. In one such study, Zhu and colleagues gathered local field potentials (LFP) from the prelimbic area of mPFC in male rats before and after CPP induction with heroin (Zhu et al., 2019). As expected, heroin-addicted rats spent significantly more time on the drug-paired side than the saline-paired side. During the post-conditioned stage, LFP revealed increased relative theta power accompanied by decreased relative gamma power, and significantly greater theta-gamma PAC in the same heroin-addicted rats. In another CPP animal study targeting the basolateral amygdala for LFP recordings (Nukitram et al., 2021), researchers found that methamphetamine-treated male mice exhibited significantly enhanced theta-gamma PAC during the post-conditioning stage compared to pre-conditioning baseline. This pattern of elevated theta-gamma PAC reported in these studies are not limited to drugs of abuse but has also been seen when testing place preference conditioned by highly palatable food (Samerphob et al., 2017), indicating that increases in theta-gamma PAC are reflecting some aspect of reward related sensory cues. Our results of AUD vs. unaffected controls, adding to these accumulated results, suggest that theta-gamma frontal PAC can serve as a biomarker for neural processes involved
