Anorexia nervosa (AN) is a severe eating disorder that can eventually lead to death, but effective therapies are missing due to a lack of knowledge about its pathophysiology. Dopamine (DA) neurons in the ventral tegmental area (VTA) and serotonin (5-HT) neurons in the dorsal Raphe nucleus (DRN) play essential roles in the control of eating and have been reported to be associated with human AN (Zhou and Palmiter, 1995; Xu et al., 2017; Watson et al., 2019; He et al., 2021). However, this association has not been validated in animal models. In addition, how DA and 5-HT neurons interact with each other to contribute to the pathology of AN remains to be elucidated.
