CARTPT and Anxiety: With injection into the lateral ventricles, CART and CART peptide fragments consistently reduce food intake in both rats and mice (Lambert et al., 1998; Edwards et al., 2000; Asakawa et al., 2001; Stanley et al., 2001) and, in mice, CART also increases time spent in the closed arms of an elevated plus-maze (Asakawa et al., 2001), indicating that it enhances anxiety-like behavior.