Oxytocin Prevents Cortisol Damage

A team from Sue Carter's lab showed that daily doses of oxytocin can prevent the cardiovascular damage caused by loneliness.

Yes, loneliness isn't only psychologically painful. It leads to chronic elevated levels of cortisol that damage the heart and raise blood pressure.

In a study announced today, Angela J. Grippo, C. Sue Carter and Stephen W. Porges, all with the Department of Psychiatry and Brain-Body Center at University of Illinois at Chicago, isolated adult female prairie voles for four weeks; the control group of females was housed with a female sibling.

These highly social beasts usually live within the family unit until they mate. Once they mate, they form their own monogamous family unit (although they may copulate occasionally with voles other than their mates). Isolation is really hard on these animals, just as it is on humans. Prairie voles also have similar patterns of receptors for oxytocin, vasopressin and dopamine to humans; it's likely that they provide a good model for human social behavior.

The researchers gave the voles either saline solution or oxytocin daily for the last two weeks. After the four-week period, each animal was put in the stressful situation of meeting an unfamiliar vole.

For the isolated voles, oxytocin improved the general regulation of the heart and lowered their stress response to the unfamiliar animal; the control group didn't show responses to the external oxytocin.

According to the researchers,

These findings suggest that oxytocin can prevent damaging cardiac changes in adult female prairie voles exposed to social isolation.

Before you run for your oxytocin inhaler, let's consider what this means. What they did in this study was to replace the oxytocin that would have been naturally generated by the voles as they huddled with their sisters. (Huddling is the non-anthropomorphic term researchers use for cuddling-type behavior.) The isolated voles couldn't cuddle; an exogenous dose of oxytocin therefore was needed to keep their cortisol down and deactivate the sympathetic nervous system.

If you were an astronaut, or in an arctic research lab, it might be a great idea to take oxytocin. But our bodies are designed to do this naturally. Nurture your own oxytocin response. If people are too much, petting a dog is a great way to get the oxytocin flowing.

See also: My Dog Really Loves Me, Inside the Loneliness Lab

Comments

[Neurofreak]

I'd like to see a study showing the longterm effects of exogenous oxytocin supplementation after a long time. I.e. does it throw the endogenous oxytocin system permanently out of whack.

While you're saying we need to learn how to produce our own oxytocin, I could see something like oxytocin being used by those who already feel socially isolated in order to overcome it briefly and become NOT isolated. (It's pretty hard to go out and make new friends when you can barely breathe everytime you meet someone new.)

[Susan Kuchinskas]

You make two very good points. Regarding the effects of long-term exogenous oxytocin, it seems very possible that it could reduce the body's natural ability to produce it. Sue Carter, one of the top oxytocin researchers, has expressed this very concern.

I agree that taking oxytocin to get over a social hump could be a good strategy. It's one our friend Alcibiades used to good advantage (until he decided he'd experienced the placebo effect).

I'm at the International Meeting for Autism Research today, and one of the researchers who is working with Eric Hollander on oxytocin therapy for ASD symptoms, brought up the idea of administering it before social skills training. So, your thinking is in synch with those of the top scientists!