What is the meaning of the term “pretreatment”?
In Drug Discrimination research the term pretreatment refers to procedures in which a novel substance is administered in addition to the training drug; by this means the ability of the novel drug to modify the response to the training drug can be determined. Different doses of the novel drug may be administered. In many cases the novel drug is an antagonist or potential antagonist of the training drug, whereas in other cases it may be expected to act additively or synergistically with the training drug. Most often the pretreatment agent is administered prior to the training drug; for example the dopamine antagonist haloperidol may be administered 30 min before amphetamine, the latter drug being administered 15 min before a behavioural test session. The temporal sequence is determined primarily by pharmacokinetics; if the hypothesized antagonist is short-acting, then it may be administered at the same time as or even after the agonist. Use of the term pretreatment is therefore related t
