Intranasal oxytocin enhances intrinsic corticostriatal functional connectivity in women

What Was Tested

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

Independent components analysis (ICA) was applied to examine connectivity between networks.

An independent analysis of oxytocin receptor (OXTR) gene expression in human subcortical and cortical areas was carried out to determine plausibility of direct oxytocin effects on OXTR.

Why It Was Studied

Oxytocin may influence various human behaviors and the connectivity across subcortical and cortical networks.

Previous oxytocin studies are male biased and often constrained by task-based inferences.

Who Took Part

According to the abstract, 26 women were involved.

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

Blinding on both sides kept the women 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 women took both Oxytocin and the comparison in turn, acting as their own control.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Affect, Cerebral Cortex, Communication, Connectome, Corpus Striatum, Gene Expression and Magnetic Resonance Imaging.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Oxytocin in 26 women.

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 2017 (Translational psychiatry), a journal based in United States.

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