Effects of Naltrexone in an Animal Model of Hunger.

Abstract

Obesity is a leading cause of premature illness and death in the United States. We have developed a food deprivation discrimination task to investigate neurochemical and dietary factors that influence the discriminative stimuli associated with food deprivation. In this study, we investigated the ability of drugs to reduce or eliminate the discriminative stimulus effects of 22 hours food deprivation in rats. We examined the ability of naltrexone, sibutramine, and rimonabant to alter the stimulus effects associated with acute food deprivation.