Oxytocin reduces the functional connectivity between brain regions involved in eating behavior in men with overweight and obesity

What Was Tested

Researchers studied Oxytocin in this randomized controlled trial publication.

Here, the researchers employed functional connectivity fMRI analysis, which measures the synchrony in activation between neural systems in a context-dependent manner.

The researchers hypothesized that OXT would attenuate the functional connectivity of the VTA with key food motivation brain areas only when participants viewed high-calorie food stimuli.

Who Took Part

By PubMed's age tags, the people studied were young adults and adults, men only.

Following drug administration, subjects completed an fMRI food motivation paradigm including images of high and low-calorie foods, nonfood objects, and fixation stimuli.

How the Study Was Run

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

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

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

A placebo (an inactive look-alike) gave the Oxytocin group a baseline to be compared against.

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

A psychophysiological interaction analysis was performed with the VTA as seed region.

What Was Measured

Here, the researchers employed functional connectivity fMRI analysis, which measures the synchrony in activation between neural systems in a context-dependent manner.

PubMed files the paper under topics including Brain, Feeding Behavior, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Neural Pathways, Obesity, Overweight and Oxytocin.

What This Means in Plain Language

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

Results are reported in around 5 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

The publication is from 2020 (International journal of obesity (2005)), a journal based in England.

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