Oxytocin impacts top-down and bottom-up social perception in adolescents with ASD: a MEG study of neural connectivity

What Was Tested

Researchers studied Oxytocin in this randomized controlled trial publication.

While several studies show that oxytocin (OT) modulates neural activation in social-related neural regions, the mechanism that underlies OT effects in ASD is not fully known yet.

Despite evidence from animal studies on connections between the oxytocinergic system and excitation/inhibition neural balance, the influence of OT on oscillatory responses among individuals with ASD has been rarely examined.

Who Took Part

By PubMed's age tags, the people studied were teenagers.

How the Study Was Run

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

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.

As a double-blind Oxytocin study, the assignments were hidden from both participants and investigators until the end.

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

Twenty-five adolescents with ASD participated in a wall-established social task during a randomized, double-blind placebo-controlled MEG and OT administration study.

Their main task was a social-related task that required the identification of social and non-social-related pictures.

The researchers hypothesized that OT would modulate the oscillatory connectivity between three pre-selected regions of interest to be more adaptive to social processing.

Specifically, the researchers focused on alpha and gamma bands which are known to play an important role in face processing and top-down/bottom-up balance.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Autistic Disorder, Facial Recognition, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Oxytocin and Social Perception.

The authors tagged it with the keywords Autism, Connectivity, Face perception, Gamma and MEG.

What This Means in Plain Language

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

The abstract goes on to report its results in about 7 sentences; this page does not restate them, so read the paper for the findings and their limits.

The publication is from 2022 (Molecular autism), a journal based in England.

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