Intranasal oxytocin reduces provoked symptoms in female patients with posttraumatic stress disorder despite exerting sympathomimetic and positive chronotropic effects in a randomized controlled trial

What Was Tested

Researchers studied Oxytocin in this randomized controlled trial publication.

To evaluate for the first time how oxytocin influences the intensity of provoked PTSD symptoms and, furthermore, cardiac control in female PTSD patients, the researchers assessed their psychic and cardiac response to trauma-script exposure with and without oxytocin pretreatment in a double-blind randomized placebo-controlled study.

Why It Was Studied

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a severe psychiatric disease accompanied by neuroendocrine changes such as adrenergic overdrive and hence an elevated cardiovascular morbidity.

Who Took Part

The study group was 35 patients.

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

The researchers used a within-subject design to study 35 female PTSD patients who received oxytocin and placebo in a 2-week interval.

Furthermore, the researchers performed a small pilot study to get an idea of the relation of the stress-modulated endogenous oxytocin levels and heart rate - the researchers correlated oxytocin serum levels with the heart rate of 10 healthy individuals before and after exposure to the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST).

How the Study Was Run

The researchers set it up as a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled and pilot study.

The patients were allocated by chance, so the Oxytocin group and the comparison group should start out alike.

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

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

It is described as a pilot, a small early test of whether a larger Oxytocin study would be practical.

What Was Measured

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

The authors tagged it with the keywords PTSD, Psychophysiology, Randomized controlled trial (RCT), Script-driven trauma imagery, Symptom provocation study and Trier Social Stress Test (TSST).

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Oxytocin in 35 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.

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 2017 (BMC medicine), a journal based in England.

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