|
 But this was a small experiment with several limitations and does
not mean oxytocin should immediately become a therapy for autism,
experts cautioned.
Oxytocin has been touted as the “love hormone” and the “moral
molecule” in the past. Naturally released during intercourse and
breastfeeding, it seems to at least make people more social, if not
actually more loving.
For the new study, researchers from the Autism Research Centre at
the University of Cambridge in the UK and other European
institutions compared 32 men with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) or
Asperger Syndrome and another 34 men without those disorders but of
similar age and IQ.
Individually, the men video-chatted with a female researcher twice.
Before one interview, participants inhaled oxytocin. Before the
other, they inhaled a placebo spray.
The video-chat software included eye tracking, which recorded how
often the subject focused on the eyes, mouth or other face areas
during the interviews.
The female interviewer asked the men how they were doing, how the
nasal spray made them feel, how they liked or didn't like being in
the study and similar questions for about five minutes.
With placebo, men with autism focused on the interviewer's eyes less
often and for less time than men without autism.
With oxytocin, the number of times men with autism looked at the
interviewer’s eyes rose from an average of 0.59 per second to more
than 0.7 per second. For men without autism, glances at the eyes
rose from 0.83 to almost 0.9 per second, the authors reported in
Translational Psychiatry.
Dr. Lawrence Scahill, director of clinical trials at the Marcus
Autism Center at Emory University in Atlanta, who was not involved
in the new research, told Reuters Health by email, “This is a step
forward, but we should be careful not to over-interpret the results.
As noted by the authors, findings with (oxytocin) in ASD have been
inconsistent.”
Video interviews are not natural interaction, he noted, and the
study participants with autism were “high functioning,” having been
medication-free for at least a year.
[to top of second column] |
The findings do add to mounting evidence that oxytocin enhances
attention to the eyes, said Tobias Grossman, a developmental
psychologist specializing in the brain processes underpinning social
interaction at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.
“However, it is unclear whether increased looking to the eyes
actually improves social functioning,” Grossman, who was also not
involved in the new study, told Reuters Health.
Prior work with children with autism shows that oxytocin increases
brain function in regions involved in social processing but doesn't
affect performance of other tasks, he said.
In other words, oxytocin may increase glances at eyes, and also
brain response to eyes, but without affecting behavior when
responding to eye cues, Grossman said.
Reduced eye contact is one of the earliest warning signs in young
children with autism and might be evident as soon as two to six
months of age, he said. Much of what happens for these infants
developmentally, and how much oxytocin may be involved, remains
unknown.
Grossman and Scahill agree that the new findings are not evidence
that oxytocin should be used as a therapy for children with autism.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/198lLql Translational Psychiatry, online
February 10, 2015.
[© 2015 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright 2015 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
 |
