Author(s)

Pilar Flores, Ana Sánchez-Kuhn, Ana Merchán, Olga Vilches, Sergio García-Martín, Margarita Moreno

Department of Psychology, University of Almería, Agrifood Campus of International Excellence CeiA3, La Ca?ada, Spain.

The development of excessive and persistent drinking under intermittent food-reinforcement schedules, known Schedule-induced polydipsia (SIP), has been proposed as a successful animal model to study compulsive behaviors. On the last decade, we have been working in our laboratory on the stratification of the compulsive rats on SIP in order to know whether differences in the acquisition of compulsive drinking behavior could predict alterations in other behavioral measures as well as in the neurochemical function typically associated with compulsive spectrum disorders. The aim of this review is to collate the main findings relevant to the characterization and use of the high compulsive drinking rats (HD) in SIP as a possible compulsive endophenotype. The review of the genetic, behavioral and neurochemical differences found in the selection allows us to conclude that HD rats could be a valid model for studying the compulsive phenotype and modelling psychopathology common to a variety of compulsivity spectrum disorders such as obsessivecompulsive disorder (OCD), schizophrenia and alcohol abuse.

Compulsivity, Endophenotype, Schedule-Induced Polydipsia, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Schizophrenia

Flores, P. , Sánchez-Kuhn, A. , Merchán, A. , Vilches, O. , García-Martín, S. and Moreno, M. (2014) Schedule-Induced Polydipsia: Searching for the Endophenotype of Compulsive Behavior. World Journal of Neuroscience, 4, 253-260. doi: 10.4236/wjns.2014.43029.