Thursday, February 22, 2007
Hey! :D Today I shall blog about how oxytocin affects stress level and also how it may be a treatment for autism.
Let's talk about how oxytocin is related to stress now
Stress and Oxytocin
Do you know that the level of oxytocin in one’s body affects how stress one feels?
In a stressful situation, both sexes produce the hormone oxytocin. Shelley E. Taylor, the main researcher of a study conducted by the University of California, suggested that this hormone has a significant effect on our body, and that animals and people with high levels of oxytocin are calmer, more relaxed, more social and less anxious. In several species, oxytocin leads to maternal behaviour and to affiliation.
However, this hormone reacts differently with the gender-specific hormones, oestrogen and testosterone, which results in the difference in the ability to cope with stress for men and women. The testosterone in men counteracts the calming effects of oxytocin, while women's oestrogen enhances it.
This actually means that women may be able to cope with stress better than men! Haha!
Anyway let's move on to see how oxytocin might be a treatment for autism.
Oxytocin Touted As Autism Treatment
Do you know what is autism? Autism is a pervasive developmental disorder of children, characterised by impaired communication, excessive rigidity, and emotional detachment.
So how is autism related to oxytocin? Well, some studies have shown that oxytocin might be a cure for autism!
The annual meeting of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (wow, what a long word!) has been told that oxytocin may have significant positive effects on adult autism patients. The study examined the effects of oxytocin - sometimes referred to as the trust drug (remember the oxytocin trust spray? Hehe.)- on repetitive behaviors and aspects of social cognition in adults with autism.
Autism could be a good candidate for treatment with oxytocin as it presents with the types of symptoms that have been found to be associated with oxytocin. Studies with animals have found that oxytocin plays a role in a variety of behaviors, including parent-child and adult-to-adult pair bonding, social memory, social cognition, anxiety reduction and repetitive behaviors.
In the study, adults with autism received an intravenous infusion of pitocin (synthetic oxytocin) over a four-hour period. During that time, participants were monitored for repetitive behaviours that are hallmarks of autism spectrum disorders including the need to tell/ask, touching, and repeating.
The study found that the infusion of pitocin produced results that were both clinically and statistically significant, bringing about a rapid reduction of repetitive behaviors over the course of the oxytocin infusion.
The researchers also looked at the effects of oxytocin on social cognition (autism patients are often unable to detect or read emotion in others through facial and voice cues). To test the participants' ability to assign significance to speech, participants listened to pre-recorded sentences with neutral semantic content that were presented with different intonations such as anger, sadness, or happiness. Participants were then asked to identify the emotion. Interestingly, participants who received oxytocin on the first testing day retained the ability to assign affective significance to speech when they returned approximately two weeks later. This effect was not found among participants who received the placebo on the first testing day.
Though the findings are promising, this research is still very preliminary. Researchers need to understand more about the safety of these potential treatments, particularly before these effects are explored in autistic children.
If such treatments are proven to be useful and safe, it’ll be a great help to people with autism, and help them to lead normal lives! Wouldn’t that be a great discovery?
(http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-12/g-nrs120106.php)
Anyway, here are just some extra information on autism:
Looks like oxytocin is a really useful hormone, right? =D
