The Impact of Oxytocin on Food Intake and Emotion Recognition in Patients with Eating Disorders: A Double Blind Single Dose Within-Subject Cross-Over Design

What Was Tested

Researchers studied Oxytocin in this randomized controlled trial publication.

Social difficulties and problems related to eating behaviour are common features of both anorexia nervosa (AN) and bulimia nervosa (BN).

The aim of this study was to examine the impact of intranasal oxytocin on consummatory behaviour and emotional recognition in patients with AN and BN in comparison to healthy controls.

Who Took Part

According to the abstract, 102 women were involved.

PubMed indexes the participants as teenagers, young adults and adults, women only.

How the Study Was Run

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

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.

Neither the women nor the staff measuring them knew who was on Oxytocin, so expectations could not easily colour the readings.

The comparison arm used a placebo, so changes seen with Oxytocin could be set against what happens without it.

In the crossover set-up each of the women took both Oxytocin and the comparison in turn, acting as their own control.

Food intake was then recorded for 24 hours post-test.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Analysis of Variance, Anorexia Nervosa, Bulimia Nervosa, Emotions, Facial Expression, Feeding Behavior and Feeding and Eating Disorders.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Oxytocin in 102 women.

Its findings take up roughly 6 sentences of the abstract and are left out here on purpose; the source paper is the place to read them.

The publication is from 2015 (PloS one), a journal based in United States.

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