Keyla Islas

Reaching New Levels With Oxytocin

Oxytocin is reach new levels, it is being used to discover the different ways it affects parts

the brain. Researchers and scientists have been making extraordinary discoveries with this

hormone. This hormone is usually called the love hormone because it plays a significant role

when it comes to social interaction. It may help find cures for children who have autism, or and

women who have social disorders. So far researchers, have come up with new treatment for their

patients to and make it more affordable for everyone in need. I have heard a little bit about

oxytocin and when I researched more about it, it became more interesting to see how oxytocin

affect the brain and relationships.

People are able to have friendly, romantic, and work relationships with one another thanks

to the hormone called oxytocin. This hormone has been in mammals, both female and male. We

see oxytocin in action when people hold hands, hug, and animals grooming each other. Oxytocin

is the hormone that helps with bonding. Oxytocin is made by the hypothalamus, and it then goes

into the bloodstream through the posterior pituitary gland(You and your Hormones). The

function of oxytocin in women is to help with the contractions during labor, producing more

prostaglandin, which produces even more contractions. It also helps during breastfeeding by

increasing lactation for the newborn. For men, oxytocin helps the sperm move and can affect

testosterone levels in the testes. This hormone is very important because it acts as a chemical

messenger that triggers a bond between a newborn and his/her mother, and in some relationship,

helping us react to certain social behaviors.

This hormone is needed and is involved with social behaviors because it is what allows

people to bond with one another. It allows people to trust, love, and socialize. It has a very
important role inside the brain and it helps us react to different types of situations. “OT

(oxytocin) enhances connectivity between nodes of the brain’s reward and socioemotional

processing systems, and does so preferentially for social (versus non social) stimuli.” (Gordon et

al., 2016, p. 1). Scientists still can’t really figure out how certain parts of the brain react to

oxytocin, but these results show that for the most part, oxytocin is helping out one way or

another.

This hormone has helped patients such as women and children with autism spectrum

disorder (ASD). Not a lot of research has been done on men. Researchers have found that

“[...]reduced social drive leads to inattention to social information and consequent failure of

developmental specialization in experience-expectant social brain systems, including action and

voice perception systems,” (Gordon et al., 2016, p. 2). This means that kids who have low levels

of oxytocin are not likely to interact with other people. Thankfully, a new synthetic version of

oxytocin, called OXT, has changed that and researchers now can see how children with the

lowest levels of oxytocin, improved a lot better than those who had normal levels. “[I]ndividuals

with the lowest [levels of] OXT concentrations showed the greatest social improvement”

(Parker, 2017, p. 4). Since these discoveries, scientists and researchers have been completing

other trials, this time with women. During their trials it was found that, “Oxytocin increased

connectivity between corticostriatal circuitry typically involved in reward, emotion, social

communication, language and pain processing” (Bethlehem, 2017, p. 1). It was also discovered

that oxytocin would travel to other parts of the brain if needed, in order to have all levels equal.

It is important because they discovered that a specific network of corticostriatal had became very

“coordinated” and it could possibly lead to the knowledge of how cognition and behavior work

under the influence of oxytocin. Autism, social anxiety, schizophrenia, and mood disorders are
also other mental disorders that researchers want to try to study with oxytocin. They still haven’t

been able to determine exactly how each of these disorders work with the hormone.

Out of all those disorders, researchers have been experimenting with schizophrenia the most.

Studies have raised some questions about certain effects that oxytocin has on the positive

symptoms, negative symptoms and cognitive symptoms of schizophrenia. This is a chronic

disorder that can affect the way someone thinks, feels, and behaves. Scientists yet don’t know the

exact cause of this disorder. According to Shillings, “...low pOT levels have been associated

with more severe symptoms in all three domains of SCZ, although these findings have been most

consistent for the negative symptoms and cognitive deficits.”(2017). Researchers don’t know if

this is how the disorder is responding to oxytocin. There has only been a few studies on positive

systems, and of those studies, it was found that females with low severe positive symptoms had

very high levels of plasma and oxytocin. There are far more research studies on negative

symptoms because they have found that severe negative symptoms had a constant relationship

with plasma and oxytocin levels. The most astonishing discovering was, that female patients

with high pOT (Peripheral Oxytocin) levels were more likely to be happier and have better

memory and social interaction. This shows how cognitive symptoms can be affected by

oxytocin.

So far the new treatment, researchers made a synthetic version of oxytocin and are having

trials where patients taking a dose through nasal spray and then they are examined so that

researchers can see exactly what oxytocin is doing and maybe even find out how it works. This

new treatment has helped a lot of families because therapies nowadays are expensive and many

of the families couldn’t afford them. The experiments seem pretty simple. Researchers took

about 20 patients and have each child take a dose of the new treatment about 45 minutes prior to
their MRI, and then they have a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) allowing

researchers to see and measure brain activity. Gordon and his research team also included a PPI

analysis,”PPI analysis is a means of identifying regions across the brain whose activity is more

highly correlated with that of a seed region in one experimental condition” (Gordon, 2016, p. 3).

During this time, scientists saw what was going on inside the brain. The patients were given tests

such as pictures of people’s eyes, to prove if the oxytocin was actually working. The brain of

some children however did show a lot more activity than other children. Thus giving researchers

new information about their research study. They found out that each child was different and that

not all of the patients reacted exactly the same way as one another. For now researchers don’t

want to encourage parents in buying the synthetic version of the hormone because they still

aren’t sure of the long-term effects, and still want to keep testing until they get the results they

want.

Most research studies had a fairly good size of people, there was about 30 patients during

one study, more boys than girls. All mostly between the ages of 6-18 for children and young

teens, and around the age of 20-50 years for female patients. For the most part, researchers

wanted to find out if oxytocin really improved social behaviors in the patients. Sometimes they

did get positive results on patients. Other times, there wasn’t a change whatsoever. This raised

some different ideas and theories about oxytocin having the ability to help improve social

behavior. Although most of their patients were male, making the study a little bias and kind of

hard to tell if oxytocin had the same effect on girls. After seeing all the results and methods from

different research studies, I do agree that oxytocin can help with autism and other social

disorders. Although researchers still want to do more studies so that the “blur” of oxytocin can

become clearer and hopefully be able to cure children with autism. Something that the
researchers could have done was to have equal number of both genders, because their study was

mostly based on more male children than female children. Another thing that they could’ve been

different would be the number of doses of the synthetic version of oxytocin. By doing this,

maybe the researchers would have had a lot more accurate results. Because most of their patients

did have low levels of oxytocin.

In conclusion, oxytocin has helped patients with their behavior because during the time

they were given their dosage, the synthetic version helped improve their social behavior and

impacted how they reacted to different situations. “These findings reveal a personalized

component to oxytocin treatment which may have important implications for accurately testing

oxytocin’s therapeutic potential, both for ASD and for a broad range of developmental and

psychiatric disorders in which patients exhibit social impairments.” (Parker et al., 2017, p.

1).This new treatment has been an exciting step for other social disorders like schizophrenia,

social anxiety disorder, and mood disorders. By far this new treatment has been the center

attention of many other researchers and for now might be the only option for them. It all just

depends on whether they make new discoveries. For the most part some of the errors might of

been the measurement of the dosage of oxytocin, or maybe they could’ve changed the time prior

to giving the dosage to the patient. But overall, these new findings and studies have helped better

understand what oxytocin does to the brain and also understand why some of the results are what

they are.

References
 Bethlehem, R. A. I., Lombardo, M. V., Lai, M. C., Auyeung, B., Crockford, S. K.,

Deakin, J., ... & Baron-Cohen, S. (2017). Intranasal oxytocin enhances intrinsic

corticostriatal functional connectivity in women. Translational psychiatry, 7(4), e1099.

doi:10.1038/tp.2017.72

Gordon, I., Jack, A., Pretzsch, C. M., Vander Wyk, B., Leckman, J. F., Feldman, R., &

Pelphrey, K. A. (2016). Intranasal oxytocin enhances connectivity in the neural circuitry

supporting social motivation and social perception in children with autism. Scientific

reports, 6,

doi:10.1038/srep35054

Parker, K. J., Oztan, O., Libove, R. A., Sumiyoshi, R. D., Jackson, L. P., Karhson, D. S.,

... & Carson, D. S. (2017). Intranasal oxytocin treatment for social deficits and

biomarkers of response in children with autism. Proceedings of the National Academy of

Sciences, 201705521.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1705521114

Shilling, Paul D., and David Feifel. "Potential of oxytocin in the treatment of schizophrenia."

CNS drugs 30.3 (2016): 193-208.

doi: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40263-016-0315-x

You and Your Hormones, www.yourhormones.info/hormones/oxytocin/.