AIM: To explore the effect of intestinal ischemia-reperfusion injury on protein levels of leptin and orexin-A in peripheral blood and their central secretory tissues and to find out the role leptin and orexin-A play in acute inflammatory responses.METHODS: An intestinal ischemia-reperfusion (I/R)injury model of rats was established and rats were divided randomly into six groups: sham-operation group, 60 min ischemia/30 min reperfusion group (I60R30), I60R90,I60R150, I60R240 and I60R360, 9 rats each group.Two highly-sensitive radioimmunoassays for leptin and orexin-A were established and used to check the change of their concentrations in peripheral blood and central secretory tissues before and after intestinal I/R injury.RESULTS: Compared with the serum leptin level before injury, it decreased significantly in I60R30 group and increased significantly in I60R360 group; compared to sham-operation group after injury, serum leptin level increased significantly in I60R360 group; compared to sham-operation group after injury, adipose leptin levels decreased significantly in I60R30 and I60R90 groups,while increased significantly in I60R360 group. There was no significant difference between the expression levels of orexin-A before and after I/R injury.CONCLUSION: Leptin has a time-dependent response and orexin-A has a delayed response to acute inflammatory stimuli such as intestinal I/R injury and they may participate in metabolic disorders in injury as inflammatory cytokines.