Body Temperature During Alcohol Withdrawal May Signal Later Depression Risk, Rat Study Finds

One of the most stubborn clinical puzzles in alcohol research is why some people who stop drinking emerge from withdrawal relatively unscathed, while others slide into weeks or months of depression and anxiety that can drive them straight back to the bottle. A new study in rats, published in the journal Translational Psychiatry, suggests that the answer may be written into the body’s earliest response to withdrawal itself. Researchers led by Alexander Zlotnik and Matthew Boyko at Soroka University Medical Center in Israel, together with Benjamin F. Gruenbaum of the Mayo Clinic, report that simple measures taken during acute withdrawal, most notably body temperature, are associated with the emergence of depression-like and anxiety-like behavior a full month after alcohol exposure ends. The findings, while preliminary, point toward a potential early-warning strategy for one of the most disabling legacies of alcohol use disorder.

The research team set out to address a well-known gap in addiction science. Alcohol use disorder is strongly associated with persistent depressive and anxiety symptoms, and these delayed affective disturbances are thought to play a major role in relapse. Yet vulnerability is strikingly heterogeneous: not everyone who experiences heavy drinking and withdrawal goes on to develop the same long-term emotional consequences. Clinicians currently have no reliable way to identify, during the acute withdrawal window, which patients are most at risk. The Israeli-led team asked whether measurable signs during withdrawal, the so-called withdrawal signature, could predict later behavioral outcomes in a controlled animal model.

To do this, the researchers used a chronic intermittent ethanol exposure protocol in Sprague-Dawley rats of both sexes. Animals received five cycles of a 10 percent ethanol liquid diet, a widely used model that produces dependence-like states without requiring forced injection procedures. Control animals received a pair-fed diet, matched for calories but without alcohol, which allows researchers to separate the effects of alcohol itself from the nutritional disruptions that often accompany heavy drinking. This design is important because malnutrition and caloric imbalance can independently alter behavior and physiology, confounding many alcohol studies.

Acute withdrawal signs were assessed 12 to 24 hours after the final ethanol cycle, a window in which physical withdrawal symptoms typically peak in this model. The team recorded five neurological withdrawal signs along with body temperature and body weight change. Then came the critical part of the design: the animals were left alone for a month, a period roughly analogous to the subacute and protracted withdrawal phase in humans, before undergoing a battery of behavioral tests. These included the sucrose preference test, a standard measure of anhedonia or loss of pleasure; the elevated plus maze, which probes anxiety-like behavior through willingness to explore open, exposed arms; and the open field test, which measures both general locomotor activity and anxiety-related avoidance of open central areas.

The results confirmed that a substantial fraction of alcohol-exposed rats developed lasting behavioral abnormalities. Compared with controls, the alcohol-exposed group showed reduced sucrose preference, indicating depression-like anhedonia; reduced exploration of the open arms of the elevated plus maze, indicating anxiety-like behavior; and reduced total distance and center-zone distance in the open field, reflecting both hypoactivity and anxiety-sensitive avoidance. Depending on the specific measure, between 28.3 percent and 56.7 percent of alcohol-exposed rats met criteria for delayed behavioral abnormalities derived from the control animals’ distributions. That heterogeneity is precisely the point: the damage was real but unevenly distributed, raising the question of what distinguished the vulnerable animals from the resilient ones.

To find out, the researchers turned to principal component analysis, a statistical technique that condenses multiple correlated variables into composite scores. When applied to the five neurological withdrawal signs, the analysis yielded a single composite measure, which the authors call a Neurological Severity Score, that explained 50.4 percent of the variance in withdrawal signs. This gave the team a principled way to ask whether the overall intensity of neurological withdrawal, rather than any single symptom, carried predictive information about later emotional outcomes.

The answer was nuanced. Among the three prespecified withdrawal measures, the Neurological Severity Score, body temperature, and weight change, body temperature emerged as the most consistently informative. It showed associations with multiple delayed outcomes, including depression-like behavior, hypoactivity, and what the authors term sensitive anxiety and sensitive comorbidity, meaning anxiety measures and combined anxiety-depression measures analyzed with thresholds tuned for statistical sensitivity. Temperature-only models showed moderate internal discrimination, with optimism-corrected area under the curve values of 0.773 for sensitive anxiety and 0.735 for hypoactivity. In practical terms, an AUC of roughly 0.75 indicates a model that performs meaningfully better than chance but is far from a definitive diagnostic tool, a level the authors themselves characterize carefully.

By contrast, the composite Neurological Severity Score and body weight change did not show consistent independent associations with the delayed behavioral outcomes. This is an intriguing result, because it suggests that the intensity of overt neurological withdrawal symptoms, such as tremor and abnormal reflexes, may not be the best guide to long-term emotional risk. Body temperature, by contrast, is a systemic physiological readout. Withdrawal-associated hypothermia or temperature dysregulation could reflect deeper disruptions in thermoregulatory circuits, stress hormone systems, or inflammatory signaling that also underlie the delayed emergence of affective disturbances. The authors are appropriately cautious on this point, noting that the association does not establish causality and does not demonstrate clinical predictive value.

Indeed, the study’s limitations are as instructive as its findings. The work was conducted in a single cohort of rats, and the authors explicitly state that independent replication is required before any conclusions can be extended to humans. Behavioral measures in rodents are imperfect proxies for human depression and anxiety, and the statistical thresholds used to define abnormal behavior were derived from control animals rather than from validated clinical criteria. The moderate AUC values, while encouraging for an early-stage study, would need substantial improvement before any translation into bedside risk stratification could be contemplated. The research also received no specific external funding, and the authors declare no competing interests, details that speak to the independence of the work but also to the scale of the effort involved.

Still, the conceptual contribution is significant. The study reframes acute alcohol withdrawal not merely as an acute medical hazard to be managed and forgotten, but as a potential window of biological information about long-term psychiatric vulnerability. If the temperature finding replicates, it would be remarkable for its simplicity: a measurement that requires nothing more than a thermometer, taken during the withdrawal period, could help flag patients who need closer monitoring for post-withdrawal depression and anxiety. In a clinical world where alcohol withdrawal is often treated as a self-limiting event, the idea that its physiological signature might foreshadow the emotional aftermath a month later is a provocative and potentially practice-changing hypothesis. For now, it remains exactly that, a hypothesis awaiting replication, but one grounded in a carefully controlled animal study with both sexes represented, prespecified measures, and appropriately conservative statistical analysis. The next step will be independent cohorts, and eventually, studies in human patients, to determine whether the body’s temperature during withdrawal truly carries a message about the mind’s future.

Subject of Research: Associations between acute alcohol withdrawal measures and delayed affective-like behavioral vulnerability after chronic intermittent ethanol exposure in rats

Article Title: Acute withdrawal signatures are associated with delayed affective-like vulnerability after chronic intermittent ethanol exposure in rats

Article References: Zlotnik, A., Gruenbaum, B. F., Negev, S., Dubilet, M., Perlov, Y., Hertz, N., Grinshpun, J., Benkovich, V., Frenkel, A., & Boyko, M. (2026). Acute withdrawal signatures are associated with delayed affective-like vulnerability after chronic intermittent ethanol exposure in rats. Translational Psychiatry. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41398-026-04503-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s41398-026-04503-7

Keywords: alcohol use disorder, ethanol withdrawal, body temperature, depression-like behavior, anxiety-like behavior, rats, chronic intermittent ethanol, anhedonia, sucrose preference, elevated plus maze, open field test, Translational Psychiatry