Oxytocin is often mislabeled as the love hormone, but it’s responsible for a wide range of
biological processes. So some researchers are starting to use the hormone as medicine.
Hey guys Julia here for DNews
Oxytocin is often cited as being responsible for a crazy little thing called love. It’s
a hormone with this chemical structure. It’s made in the brain, in the hypothalamus and
is secreted by the pituitary gland and lots of thing increase our body’s production
of it. Not just love.
It’s more accurate to called it the social hormone. Yes it’s released in both sexes
during climax, but it also performs a wide variety of social functions. It bonds mothers
to their children. It’s released when women breastfeed their babies. But it’s also released
when we look at our dogs. And it also plays a role in fear and anxiety which we’ve talked
about in another episode. (Link down below) So it does so much more than make us fall
in love.
It can also be used as medicine. It’s been used to induce labor and control bleeding
of childbirth for years. But it can help in so many other ways.
It MAY even help sober us up. Well it definitely sobers rats up. In study published in the
journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences researchers got rats drunk and
made them do a sobriety test which tested their coordination. One group of rats was
given a dose of oxytocin along with their alcohol while the other group had alcohol
alone. The researchers found that the rats with oxytocin retained the full use of the
coordination skills even while drunk! The oxytocin sobered up the rats by acting on
the same receptors in the brain as alcohol, the delta-subunit GABA-A receptors. When alcohol
acts on these receptors, it blocks the brain’s ability to fine tune motor control. But oxytocin
doesn’t work on other receptors that alcohol effects, so you would still feel inebriated.
The researchers wondered whether or not oxytocin would be a good mechanism for a new type of
drug that could work with alcohol related disorders. But worried that drug that stopped
people from getting sloppy drunk would only encourage more drinking.
Oxytocin as medicine would be more than just be as a drinking buddy. It could actually
help people make more buddies. Making friends is hard for anyone, but many people who live
with psychiatric disorders especially struggle with social situations. One small study published
in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that oxytocin could help.
This study found that just one sniff of an oxytocin nasal spray improved brain function
in some children with autism. While a deficiency of oxytocin isn’t a specifically autism
related trait, levels of oxytocin vary naturally from person to person. In this study researchers
gave participants a nasal spray filled with oxytocin or a placebo. Those who got the oxytocin
spray showed greater brain activity in the regions associated with rewards and emotion
recognition when performing a social task. Basically their brains rewarded them more
when they participated in social tasks than those who just had the placebo spray.
Oxytocin can even help those who suffer from phobias according to a study published in
the journal Biological Psychiatry. Most people are afraid of something, like spiders or heights;
maybe you were bit by a dog when you were a kid and now you’re terrified of them;
that’s what psychologists called conditioning. But now your girlfriend has a dog and well…
you’d like to get over that fear. That’s going to take a little reconditioning.
The traditional approach is to expose a patient to their fear gradually over time and in a
safe environment. That way the alarm system in their brain can learn to calm down, it
can learn there’s no real threat around that fear. This overwriting of the memory
is called extinction. But extinction is a long and hard process. There’s the trauma
of being exposed to the fear and relapses.
But oxytocin makes that overwriting process go a little faster. In this study, researchers
created a fear response in participants by giving them a little electric shock when they
looked at a certain picture. Brain scans revealed that this created a fear response in their
brain every time they saw the picture. The researchers then gave half the participants
a nasal spray of oxytocin and the other half a placebo. And then the researchers overwrote
the fear memory by showing the picture without the shock. They found that the fear center
of the brain the amygdala, showed less activity in those who got oxytocin than those who got
the placebo.
But before you run off and try to fix your fears with oxytocin, researchers from Concordia
University's Centre for Research in Human Development caution to not use it off label,
because it can cause less than desired other effects.
If you want a boost to your mood, there’s no medicine like telling that special person
in your life how much they mean to you. Kay Jewelers can help you do just that. Every
kiss begins with Kay.
As for those less desired other effects, oxytocin doesn’t just cause warm and fuzzy feelings.
In one study researchers found it can lead people to be overly sensitive to other people’s
emotions. Which isn’t always a good thing. They give the example of your boss being uncomfortable
in their chair and making a face, and if you’re overly sensitive thanks to oxytocin you might
think that was face about you. Oxytocin can also increase the strength of
memories of negative social situations and increase fear and anxiety. So if you have
questions about the dark side of the so called love hormone, check out this video right here.
So would you ever take oxytocin? or have you? tell us about it?