Temporal profile of intranasal oxytocin in the human autonomic nervous system at rest: An electrocardiography and pupillometry study

What Was Tested

Researchers studied Oxytocin in this randomized controlled trial publication.

The researchers aimed to describe the temporal profile of IN-OT at six 10-min time windows from 15- to 100-min post-administration in 20 male participants at rest while continuously recording their pupillary in an eyes-open condition and cardiac activity in eyes-open and eyes-closed conditions.

Why It Was Studied

Human social behavior is modulated by oxytocin (OT).

Who Took Part

The study group was 20 participants.

PubMed tags the participants as men only.

The researchers used a double-blind, placebo-controlled, within-subjects design study where the researchers extracted two proxies of parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) activity: high-frequency heart rate variability (HF-HRV) and pupillary unrest index (PUI); and a proxy of sympathetic nervous system activity: sample entropy of the pupillary unrest.

How the Study Was Run

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

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

Blinding on both sides kept the participants and researchers unaware of who received Oxytocin.

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

What Was Measured

PubMed files the paper under topics including Oxytocin, Autonomic Nervous System, Social Behavior, Electrocardiography and Heart Rate.

Author keywords: neuropeptide, pupil unrest and resting state.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Oxytocin in 20 participants.

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.

Results are reported in around 2 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

The publication is from 2023 (Journal of psychopharmacology (Oxford, England)), a journal based in United States.

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