Sunday, February 11, 2007
Inhalable oxytocin could become a cure for social fears
Oxytocin is a hormone long known for its effects in the human body. It helps spur labour contractions, breastfeeding and orgasm. It has also long figured in research on bonding in animals.
Researchers now report they can boost oxytocin in the human brain using a nasal spray. And when they do, trust seems to rise and social fear seems to abate, raising the possibility that oxytocin-based drugs might eventually help people with mental illnesses that involve fear of others, from crippling shyness to autism and schizophrenia.
This month, Meyer-Lindenberg and others reported in The Journal of Neuroscience that when young men snorted oxytocin, brain scans showed that fear centres became less responsive to threatening faces.
The journal Nature recently published research showing that when subjects played a game that hinged on trust, those who had snorted oxytocin were more likely to trust other players.
Also, brain scans suggest that the fear centres in the brains of autistic people are hypersensitive in social situations, so perhaps oxytocin could help quiet them.
Oxytocin research has been reaching the kind of critical mass that all but guarantees that pharmaceutical companies will be seeking to develop oxytocin-based drugs, said Robert Ring, a neuroscientist and oxytocin researcher at Wyeth Pharmaceuticals.
Ring reported at last month's Society for Neuroscience conference that oxytocin or a similar molecule reduced anxiety in mice subjected to a variety of stressful situations.
"These results suggest that the development of oxytocin-like drugs may offer a novel way to treat anxiety disorders in humans," he said.
But the new work on oxytocin is spurring other warnings. Some researchers note that it may have potential as a date-rape drug, since oxytocin is involved both in trust and in sexual arousal.
7:35 PM
let our love blossom this valentine..
