On the role of oxytocin in borderline personality disorder.

What It Covers

The paper reports a study of Oxytocin, published as a review.

Interpersonal dysfunction is central to borderline personality disorder (BPD).

Recent research has focused on the role of oxytocin (OT) in BPD, particularly regarding associations of OT activity with symptoms, genetic polymorphisms of the oxytocin receptor coding gene (OXTR) in BPD, and experimental modification of interpersonal core problems of patients with BPD such as hypervigilance towards threat detection, mistrust, and non-verbal behaviour during social interaction by intranasal application of OT.

Why It Was Studied

The study of oxytocin can contribute to the understanding of the neurobiology of borderline personality disorder.

Oxytocin is critically involved in attachment security, and methylation of the oxytocin receptor may play a role in the epigenetic modulation of early adversity.

Who the Included Studies Covered

By PubMed's age tags, the people studied were adults.

Secondary literature on trauma and attachment in relation to OT was also considered relevant.

How the Review Was Done

A literature ('medline') review was performed using the keywords 'oxytocin' and 'borderline personality disorder'.

What Was Measured

There is insufficient knowledge of how oxytocin interacts with vasopressin, testosterone, dopamine, and serotonin, which are also important key players in the experience of social reward and stress responsivity.

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Anxiety, Borderline Personality Disorder, Gene-Environment Interaction, Interpersonal Relations, Oxytocin, Psychotherapy and Receptors, Oxytocin.

The authors tagged it with the keywords attachment, childhood adversity, developmental plasticity and intergenerational transmission.

What This Means in Plain Language

This is a review of Oxytocin.

The abstract goes on to report its results in about 5 sentences; this page does not restate them, so read the paper for the findings and their limits.

The publication is from 2016 (The British journal of clinical psychology), a journal based in England.

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