The influence of gender and oxytocin on stress reactivity, cigarette craving, and smoking in a randomized, placebo-controlled laboratory relapse paradigm

What Was Tested

Researchers studied Oxytocin in this randomized controlled trial publication.

This study assessed the influence of gender and oxytocin on stress reactivity, craving, and smoking in a randomized, placebo-controlled laboratory relapse paradigm.

Why It Was Studied

Female cigarette smokers tend to show greater cessation failure compared with males.

Variables that contribute to the maintenance of smoking, including stress and craving, may differentially impact male and female smokers.

Who Took Part

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

Male and female adult cigarette smokers (ages 18-45) were enrolled (women oversampled 2:1) and completed a laboratory session, in which intranasal oxytocin or placebo was administered followed by a laboratory social stress task.

The role of gender and oxytocin were assessed on measures of stress reactivity, cigarette craving, latency to smoke in a resistance task, subjective responses to smoking, and ad-libitum smoking.

How the Study Was Run

In design terms this was a randomized and placebo-controlled study.

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

The comparison arm used a placebo, so changes seen with Oxytocin could be set against what happens without it.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Cigarette Smoking, Craving, Oxytocin, Recurrence, Research, Sex Characteristics and Smoking Cessation.

The authors tagged it with the keywords Cortisol, Cue reactivity, Gender, Relapse and Stress.

What This Means in Plain Language

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

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 2020 (Psychopharmacology), a journal based in Germany.

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