The role of previous exposure in the appetitive and consummatory effects of orexigenic neuropeptides

The ingestion of foods is comprised of two distinct phases of behavior: appetitive and consummatory. While most food intake paradigms include both phases, the intraoral intake test emphasizes the stereotyped consummatory-phase by infusing a liquid food directly into the oral cavity. Several hypothalamic peptides have been shown to increase intake of chow in standard food intake paradigms and the current experiments sought to test whether these peptides would increase food intake in the intraoral intake paradigm. NPY, melanin-concentrating hormone (MCH) and orexin-A were infused into the third ventricle (i3vt) in a counterbalanced latin-square design just prior to rats getting 0.1 M sucrose solution infused via indwelling intraoral catheters and compared it to intake on bottle tests with access to the same sucrose solution. On the first day, each peptide increased intraoral intake relative to saline in the between-subjects comparison. Moreover, intake of sucrose following i3vt saline increased as a function of training. By the final day of the experiment, rats receiving saline consumed as much sucrose as rats receiving NPY, MCH, or orexin-A. This finding was conceptually replicated in the second experiment in which rats drank sucrose freely from a bottle on the home cage. A third experiment directly assessed the role of previous exposure in the sucrose intake induced by NPY. Those results confirm that repeated exposure to sucrose increases baseline intake and attenuates the hyperphagic effect of NPY. These results are consistent with two conclusions: (1) NPY, MCH, and orexin-A increase both appetitive and consummatory-phase ingestive behaviors on initial exposures; (2) repeated training interacts with the effects of these orexigenic peptides.