Enterostatin increases extracellular serotonin and dopamine in the lateral hypothalamic area in rats measured by in vivo microdialysis

The effect of enterostatin injection into the rat lateral hypothalamic area (LHA) on serotonin and dopamine releases in extracellular space was investigated by in vivo microdialysis technique. The primary focus being to understand whether a small amount of enterostatin crossing the blood-brain barrier correlates with activity changes in serotonergic and dopaminergic nervous systems or not. We found a significant elevation in serotonin release in the LHA. The enterostatin perfusion also induced a smaller but significant increase in dopamine level than serotonin one. This result suggests that enterostatin plays some sort of role in the control of feeding of fat through the control serotonergic and dopaminergic satiety mechanism. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.