Actigraphy assessment of motor activity and sleep in patients with alcohol withdrawal syndrome and the effects of intranasal oxytocin

What Was Tested

This randomized controlled trial paper looks at Oxytocin.

Intranasal oxytocin has been proposed as a possible treatment of acute alcohol withdrawal.

Who Took Part

The study group was 40 patients.

By PubMed's age tags, the people studied were teenagers, young adults, adults, middle-aged adults and older adults, both men and women.

This study was a part of a randomized, double blind, placebo-controlled trial in which 40 patients with alcohol use disorder admitted for acute detoxification were included.

Finally, the actigraphy results were compared to those in a group of 34 healthy individuals.

How the Study Was Run

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

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

Neither the patients 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.

Of these, 20 received insufflations with intranasal oxytocin and 20 received placebo.

Outcomes were actigraphy-recorded motor activity during 5-hour sequences following the insufflations and a full 24-hour period, as well as actigraphy-recorded sleep.

Results were related to clinical variables of alcohol intake and withdrawal, including self-reported sleep.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Actigraphy, Alcoholism, Motor Activity, Oxytocics, Oxytocin, Placebo Effect and Sleep.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Oxytocin in 40 patients.

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 (PloS one), a journal based in United States.

More context: the Oxytocin compound page.