Relationship between incubated sucrose-craving and frontal cortical expression of dopamine receptors

Nearly half of people in the United States are clinically obese. Highly palatable foods, like high-fat or high-sugar foods, increase dopamine release within the forebrain driving eating behavior. Over time, cues associated with highly palatable foods come to elicit craving for that food and this conditioned reinforcement also involves forebrain dopamine release. How the expression of forebrain dopamine receptors relates to the magnitude of cue-elicited food-craving is not known. To address this, the present study employs immunoblotting approaches to quantify the protein expression of the 5 different dopamine receptors within frontal cortex subregions in a rat model of sucrose-craving.