Meal patterns in rats with nigrostriatal dopamine-depleting lesions, subdiaphragmatic vagotomy, and their combination

Rats which had sustained 97% bilateral striatal dopamine depletions after intranigral 6-hydroxydopamine recovered feeding and drinking to show normal meal patterns on both solid and liquid food. The motor acts of eating were somewhat slow but, in contrast to lateral hypothalamic lesioned animals, there were no interruptions for other activities. Vagotomy produced the expected decrease in liquid meal size, and an identical change was observed when the dopamine-depleted rats were similarly vagotomized. The fragmented meal patterns seen after far-lateral hypothalamic lesions do not arise from damage to either of the systems here investigated.