Vasopressin Boosts Placebo Analgesic Effects in Women: A Randomized Trial

What Was Tested

This randomized controlled trial paper looks at Oxytocin and Vasopressin.

Social cues and interpersonal interactions strongly contribute to evoke placebo effects that are pervasive in medicine and depend upon the activation of endogenous modulatory systems.

Who Took Part

The abstract describes 109 participants taking part.

By PubMed's age tags, the people studied were young adults, adults and middle-aged adults, both men and women.

How the Study Was Run

The design is described as randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled and parallel-group.

Because people in this Oxytocin study were split into groups at random, differences between the groups are less likely to reflect who happened to join each one.

Blinding on both sides kept the participants and researchers unaware of who received Oxytocin.

Some participants received a placebo instead of Oxytocin, giving a reference point.

Groups ran in parallel: each of the participants stayed in one arm throughout.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Analgesics, Non-Narcotic, Anxiety, Arginine Vasopressin, Hydrocortisone, Oxytocin, Pain and Pain Perception.

Author keywords: Expectancy, Sexual dimorphism, Stress and Verbal suggestions.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Oxytocin and Vasopressin in 109 participants.

Its findings take up roughly 5 sentences of the abstract and are left out here on purpose; the source paper is the place to read them.

The publication is from 2016 (Biological psychiatry), a journal based in United States.

More context: the Oxytocin compound page and the Vasopressin compound page, all human trials.