Adolescent alcohol exposure disrupts retrosplenial cortex physiology in adult males

Abstract

Adolescent binge drinking can lead to a myriad of issues in adulthood, including psychiatric comorbidities that worsen clinical prognosis. Efforts to understand the effects of adolescent alcohol exposure on later health outcomes have unveiled lasting effects on physiology of brain regions critical for associative learning processes, including the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex (PFC). Here, we tested the hypothesis that adolescent alcohol exposure would produce lasting alterations in physiology within the retrosplenial cortex (RSC), another region critical for associative learning that is reciprocally connected to the hippocampus and PFC. In support of this hypothesis, we found that adolescent intermittent ethanol (AIE) vapor exposure resulted in lasting reductions in intrinsic excitability in RSC pyramidal cells of adult mice. Importantly, these changes were sex-specific, occurring in males but not females. This work suggests that the RSC may be a key, vulnerable locus to the detrimental effects of adolescent alcohol.