Effects of vasopressin on event-related potential indicators of cognitive stimulus processing in young and old humans

What Was Tested

Researchers studied Vasopressin in this controlled clinical trial publication.

To assess aspects of cognitive stimulus processing, event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded.

Why It Was Studied

This study compared the effects of arginine vasopressin (AVP) on central nervous stimulus processing in old and young mentally healthy subjects.

Who Took Part

The study group was 28 subjects.

PubMed indexes the participants as adults, older adults and people over 80, both men and women.

A total of 22 old and 28 young subjects were tested on two subsequent days.

Substances were administered intranasally 22, 12, and 1 hour(s) prior to experimental sessions.

How the Study Was Run

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

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

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

Prior to the first session, all subjects received placebo.

The study was held double blind.

The subjects performed an auditory "oddball" task consisting of rare target tones (requiring a button press response) interspersed throughout a sequence of frequent standard tones while an electroencephalogram was recorded.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Aging, Analysis of Variance, Arginine Vasopressin, Arousal, Attention, Cognition and Electroencephalography.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Vasopressin in 28 subjects.

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.

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 1994 (Journal of gerontology), a journal based in United States.

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