Integrating the roles of midbrain dopamine circuits in behavior and neuropsychiatric disease

Dopamine (DA) is a behaviorally and clinically diverse neuromodulator that controls CNS function. DA plays major roles in many behaviors including locomotion, learning, habit formation, perception, and memory processing. Reflecting this, DA dysregulation produces a wide variety of cognitive symptoms seen in neuropsychiatric diseases such as Parkinson’s, Schizophrenia, addiction, and Alzheimer’s disease. Here, we review recent advances in the DA systems neuroscience field and explore the advancing hypothesis that DA’s behavioral function is linked to disease deficits in a neural circuit-dependent manner. We survey different brain areas including the basal ganglia’s dorsomedial/dorsolateral striatum, the ventral striatum, the auditory striatum, and the hippocampus in rodent models. Each of these regions have different reported functions and, correspondingly, DA’s reflecting role in each of these regions also has support for being different. We then focus on DA dysregulation states in Parkinson’s disease, addiction, and Alzheimer’s Disease, emphasizing how these afflictions are linked to different DA pathways. We draw upon ideas such as selective vulnerability and region-dependent physiology. These bodies of work suggest that different channels of DA may be dysregulated in different sets of disease. While these are great advances, the fine and definitive segregation of such pathways in behavior and disease remains to be seen. Future studies will be required to define DA’s necessity and contribution to the functional plasticity of different striatal regions.