Oxytocin improves compassion toward women among patients with PTSD

What Was Tested

The paper reports a study of Oxytocin, published as a randomized controlled trial.

The first aim of this study was to examine whether patients with PTSD suffer from deficits in compassion and to examine the association between the clusters of PTSD symptoms and these deficits.

Why It Was Studied

Although impairments in social skills, including empathic abilities, are common in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the ability to feel compassion-a pro-social behavior that is based on empathy and drives them to help others-has never been assessed among these patients.

Who Took Part

According to the abstract, 32 patients were involved.

The age groups tagged for this paper are young adults, adults and middle-aged adults, both men and women.

How the Study Was Run

In design terms this was a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled and crossover study.

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 patients and researchers unaware of who received Oxytocin.

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 patients took both Oxytocin and the comparison in turn, acting as their own control.

What Was Measured

Although impairments in social skills, including empathic abilities, are common in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the ability to feel compassion-a pro-social behavior that is based on empathy and drives them to help others-has never been assessed among these patients.

PubMed files the paper under topics including Empathy, Oxytocin and Stress Disorders, Post-Traumatic.

The authors tagged it with the keywords Compassion, Numbing, PTSD and Treatment.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Oxytocin in 32 patients.

With fewer than 40 people, it is a small study, so it is better read as an early signal for further research than as a settled answer.

The publication is from 2016 (Psychoneuroendocrinology), a journal based in England.

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