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Joy Goes to an Oxytocin Party

My pal Joy Nordenstrom, CEO of JoyofRomance.com, hosts romantic dinner parties and coaches clients on how to be more romantic. She also produces IntelligentLove: 411 for Men. In this series, she uses scientific principles to help men get more real love and connection with women.

She went to an oxytocin party, where people took oxytocin lozenges. I had always thought that you could only get liquid oxytocin with a doctor's prescription, but I have since found that this is not true!

Watch the video here: Oxytocin Party Video

Ecstasy Drug Could be PTSD Breakthrough

Two researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology propose that ecstasy, also known as MDMA, could be a valuable tool in therapy to treat post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.

According to the article on EurekaAlert, Pål-Ørjan Johansen and Teri Krebs think that the recreational drug could be valuable for several reasons, including its ability to produce an oxytocin response.

According to Johansen and Krebs, "MDMA [ecstasy] has a combination of pharmacological effects that…could provide a balance of activating emotions while feeling safe and in control."

Psychiatrists are testing oxytocin inhalants to produce similar results. Oxytocin and/or ecstasy/MDMA might also be helpful for social anxiety disorder.

The entire journal article, How could MDMA (ecstasy) help anxiety disorders? A neurobiological rationale, in Psychopharmacology, is available for a little while for free; I've linked to the permanent abstract.

Actually, I covered this story back in February. Please see the earlier blog entry on oxytocin and PTSD.

Oxytocin Helps a Guy Ejaculate

One guy, okay? But this study points to still another potential therapeutic use for oxytocin, which sure seems like some kinda wonder drug.

A test published in April 2008)  at Cedars Sinai examined whether inhaling oxytocin would help a male patient who couldn't orgasm. The docs had ruled out medical conditions, drugs and  "psychological issues" as the cause of his inability to  ejaculate.  Yes, it did. He was able to ejaculate.

Why this worked is unclear from the abstract. My speculations:

Oxytocin relieves anxiety, and maybe this man had become so anxious about orgasm that he couldn't do it. (Although the researchers ruled out psychological issues, and I assume anxiety would classify.)

Oxytocin is responsible for erection and ejaculation (along with other chemicals). And a review of animal studies opined that the reason that SSRIs lower sexual desire and function could be because they decrease the sensitivity of oxytocin receptors. If this patient's oxytocin receptors had reduced sensitivity for some reason, the extra jolt of oxytocin could have been what was needed.

Ecstacy Helps PTSD Treatment

Two Norwegian scientists, Pål-Ørjan Johansen, a psychologist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, and  Teri Krebs, a neurobiologist at the university, have offered an explanation for how ecstasy aka MDMA might help people get over post-traumatic stress disorder.
They've analyzed a study by Michael Mithoefer that found ecstasy made treatment much more effective, as well as other studies. From Science Daily:

Mithoefer took 21 people with chronic PTSD, all of whom had been subjected to documented abuse. All had also been through six months of treatment with traditional therapy, in addition to a three-month treatment with drugs. None, however, had shown any improvement from the treatment.

Under Mithoefer’s treatment, the patients stopped their usual anxiety-reducing drugs, and began a new treatment with twelve sessions of psychotherapy. During two of these therapy sessions, some patients were given doses of MDMA, while the others were given a placebo (a fake pill).

Two months after the treatment, 92 percent of MDMA patients had clinically significant improvement in their conditions: They were more open to therapy and were able to process the trauma.

The researches propose that part of this effect is due to MDMA's increasing levels  of oxytocin in the brain, thereby making the person feel more trusting and open to the therapeutic relationship.  MDMA also reduces activity in the amygdala -- and this is likely also the result of the increase in oxytocin, because in other tests, inhaling oxytocin lowered activity in this part of the brain, which is responsible for pre-conscious emotional reactions such as fear.

The Norwegian University of Science and Technology (2009, January 8). Ecstasy For Treatment Of Traumatic Anxiety. ScienceDaily.

Finally! Massage Increases Oxytocin

UCLA scientists have confirmed something we feel intuitively must be true: Massage increases oxytocin.

Countless magazine and newspaper articles have said getting a massage is a good way to increase your oxytocin levels, and it sure makes sense. But there has been no scientific evidence that it was the case. According to this article in the Boston Globe, a new study included not only playing the Trust Game after getting a massage, but also drawing people's blood to measure the oxytocin levels. This study used men and women, too.

According to the article,

volunteers at UCLA were randomly assigned to be massaged or just wait in a room for 15 minutes and then play an anonymous, one-shot, money-giving game via computer. Those who were massaged returned 38 percent of the money that was given to them, compared with 11 percent for those who were not massaged. The researchers also drew blood from each person before and after the experiment to see if physiological changes - namely in the level of the hormone oxytocin, which is known to influence bonding behavior - could explain the effect. There was an increase in oxytocin only for those people who were massaged and then played the game.

Another way to describe the effect of oxytocin is to say that the well-kneaded group returned 243 percent more money than the stiffer bunch. The effect was stronger in women than in men, which also makes sense, given our greater sensitivity to oxytocin's effects.

They saw this effect not so much after the massage itself as after the trust game. Paul Zak, one of the researchers, thinks that the massage acts as a signal to the brain to be open to trusting interactions.

Another way of saying this is that massage makes us more relaxed, and when we're relaxed, we tend to be more open to others.

To get the most oxytocin-producing benefits, choose a gentle, soothing massage style. Avoid deep tissue work or acupressure; while these are valuable techniques for reducing muscle tension, their intensity may not allow for the right kind of relaxation. The Swedish or Esalen styles use gentler, rhythmic motions that have been shown to elevate oxytocin levels in animals. After the massage, you can test whether you feel more open to connection by calling or visiting with a friend.

"Monetary Sacrifice Among Strangers is Mediated by Endogenous Oxytocin Release after Physical Contact," is by Vera B. Morhenn, Jang Woo Park, Elisabeth Piper, Paul J. Zak, in Evolution and Human Behavior.

Oxytocin Hype and Backlash

I read New York magazine, and they have a regular item called something like "We ride the shifting curve of expectations." They chart where cultural events like books and films fall on the cycle from hype to backlash against the hype.

In the past couple of weeks, I've watched oxytocin follow a similar path. Because I look at every news article and study regarding oxytocin, as well as all the blog posts discovered by a couple blog search tools, I can see what studies spark news coverage, and what kinds of memes spread.

Oxytocin hype has been rampant for the past three weeks. As far as I can tell, it got started with study led by Thomas Baumgartner at the University of Zurich showing that inhaling oxytocin increased people's willingness to trust other players in an economic game, even after they'd been shafted once. This is the team at the University of Zurich that did the very first human oxytocin studies showing that oxytocin increased trust. (Read my blog post about the previous research here.)

In this study, "We find that subjects in the oxytocin group show no change in their trusting behavior after they learned that their trust had been breached several times while subjects receiving placebo decrease their trust."

Some genius copywriter translated this to, "Oxytocin Makes Us Trust after Betrayal," leading to a spate of stories about how "Spray Said to Turn People into Pushovers." And it also led to my appearance on the Fox Morning With Mike and Juliet show.

Not to be outdone, Markus Heinrichs, who leads the Zurich team, talked to reporters (but did not, I believe, actually publish anything new) about their work using oxytocin to treat social anxiety disorder, which has been under way for several years. That sparked another news rush.

They mostly followed the lines of this one, Scientists Find Childbirth Wonder Drug That Can Cure Shyness, kindly sent to me by Blaine. Is that a sexy headline or what? The articles finally recognized the work of Paul Zak, who has been giving oxytocin to humans for several years, without a lot of notice. I didn't blog all these articles, partly because they were so ubiquitous and partly because I was finishing the manuscript of my book, ta daaa!

Already, though, oxytocin hype has faded into the final cycle, backlash. In part this is simply because news reporters have to come up with new stories every day. Once you've written a story hyping the prospects of oxytocin -- or worse, when your competitors have and you haven't -- where do you go from there but to write another one decrying the first. Ideally, at least in the olden days when I started my career as a journalist, you were supposed to find naysayers to quote in every story. But that was then.

The Neurocritic links to an ABC News story now insisting, "Researchers Balk at Media Reports Hyping 'Love Drug' Hormone's Effects."

And Paul Zanucci of American Sentinel calls it, "The Oxytocin Nightmare to Come -- Drugging America." I agree with his premise, and have been saying for a while that oxytocin will be the next Prozac. That is, while oxytocin-based or oxytocin-like drugs will be developed for social anxiety disorder and ASD, it will eventually be prescribed for much milder psychological situations. Zanucci writes,

Every time someone blows their nose, there’s a new prescription written for nasal sprays and antihistamines even though products like Zyrtec can now be bought OTC in generic form.  Every time someone is stressed out by work, another prescription is written for anti-anxiety medication.  People are happy as clams to pay $30 to $50 for the latest in pharmaceutical living, not considering that their insurance is paying another $300 behind the scenes and that their cost for insurance is going to go up again next year.

Nevertheless, I think calling this a nightmare is way too anti-hyperbolic. I'd much rather we revise labor, birth and parenting practices to allow individuals to form a healthy oxytocin response naturally. But our society is probably too sick and mechanistic for that. In which case, a nation of loved-out citizens who inhale oxytocin several times a day would be preferable to our extant war-mongering, paranoid, crabby society.

At any rate, I think we can shortly expect oxytocin to fall off the news cycle for at least a few months.

Get Oxytocin Safely in Clinical Trials

In response to a recent comment, I took a new look at the database of clinical trials that are recruiting subjects for oxytocin studies, available at ClinicalTrials.gov. I see that Daniel Feifel of the University of California San Diego is recruiting subjects for two studies to test oxytocin on symptoms of schizophrenia.

And it looks like Evdokia Anagnostou of Eric Hollander's Mt. Sinai team is recruiting for a couple of studies of adults with ASD, although it's hard to tell if the database is current.

Meanwhile, the National Institutes of Mental Health is recruiting for a study of people without psychiatric diagnoses on "Identifying the Role of Oxytocin and Vasopressin in the Functioning of Neurocognitive Systems Involved in Mood Disorders."

We can expect more and more of these as #1 scientists strive to learn more and more about the neurochemical basis of emotion and #2 pharm companies look for new classes of drugs they can sell.

Way to Exploit the News!

Oxytocin was all over the news last week, thanks to the latest study from Zurich showing that inhaling oxytocin increased people's willingness to trust while playing economic games. Those who snorted oxytocin were willing to trust again even after the other player shorted them.

This is one of a series of studies in which people in the lab exchange money in a controlled situation; I think it got so much attention because of the juicy word "betrayal" used to describe a player's refusal to play fair. But it should be pointed out that sitting in a lab engaging in a simple interaction is far from true betrayal -- and it's unlikely that inhaling oxytocin would make you trust someone out in the real world who did something truly mean.

At any rate, a new company has gotten onto the oxytocin bandwagon. HBC Protocols, a ten-year-old Los Angeles company that specializes in wellness and nutritional supplements, has released a new product, Oxytocin Formula Homeopathic Product, that does contain oxytocin. They've backed up the product with a very well-produced website.

The product is designed to be put under the tongue, a good place to absorb chemicals and not as unpleasant or potentially damaging to the mucous membranes as inhalation. I'm going to try to find out more information about the product. The fact that it's "homeopathic" makes me wonder how much oxytocin it contains. The label says "oxytocin 2C," as opposed to other ingredients, which are "6X" or so. I assume this is the homeopathic style of describing formulae.

I have no idea whether there's enough of a dose to do anything, or how well the oxytocin solution would hold up. But it shows the keen interest in oxytocin that's out there.

Where Can I Get My Hands on Some Oxytocin?

The latest report about how oxytocin makes people more willing to trust after betrayal really struck a nerve. People really really want to get their hands on this stuff: For everyone who is afraid of being hurt, there are five people who are dying to open up.

Someone wrote to me asking where to get oxytocin; he and his wife are having problems. I wrote about my experience taking oxytocin in 2006, here. This is how I answered:

I performed this experiment on myself a couple of years ago, when it was quite easy to purchase oxytocin over the internet. At the time, searching for oxytocin brought up several paid ads from reputable companies that supply chemicals to researchers, and I was able to purchase with a credit card. I notice that these ads no longer appear, probably because these companies realized that many people ordering the product were consumers.

In any case, when you buy oxytocin this way, it's difficult to handle. It degrades quickly when it's mixed with water, and it's a minuscule amount. I was guided by the blog of a guy who made all sorts of wild experiments with such chemicals that he ordered online.

I don't think it's ethical or wise for me to provide any more details about where or how to buy oxytocin. I believe -- but don't know for sure -- that it's not a controlled substance in the United States; I don't know about in other countries.

Someone wrote me that he had tried the oxytocin spray that had been prescribed for his lactating wife. And a psychiatrist in Canada sometimes prescribes this inhalant for kids with autism. These are called off-label uses: the doctor obtains the drug legally and prescribes it legally, but for a condition that the drug hasn't been approved for.

Several drug companies are working to develop oxytocin-based drugs to treat social phobia and some trials have begun.

All that said, let me propose an alternative: Oxytocin is usually released naturally when we are with another person in a situation where we feel safe. Also when we're stroked, make love and orgasm. However, this brain response seems to be learned after we're born, in the first few years of life -- although the brain continues to grow and change throughout our lives. If you and your wife have "normal" oxytocin responses, it could be a matter of simply making love, making sure that you  move very slowly through her arousal to orgasm. Often, when couples have problems, sex is the first thing to go. But I think that a lack of happy satisfying sex also can lead to relationship problems. I experience this myself in my relationship. Oxytocin makes us calmer and more easy-going, so the partner's bad habits don't bother us as much.

Other things you can try are massaging each other, if you're both able to do so in a soothing way that feels good; getting massages together at a spa or weekend retreat; taking some kind of workshop that has exercises which allow you to go into "limbic resonance," the state in which your bodies are attuned. Attunement likely invokes the oxytocin response.

Update Dec. 6 2008: Because so many people come to my site looking for a place to buy oxytocin, I have decided to post the affiliate ad you see at the top of this post. I am not endorsing this product. However, if, after reading this and others of my posts, you want to buy it, if you buy by clicking on this ad, I'll get paid by the advertiser.

Oxytocin Keeps Us Trusting after Betrayal

Researchers at the University of Zurich, where they did the first experiments with giving humans oxytocin via nasal spray, announced a new study showing that oxytocin makes people more willing to trust again after betrayal.

Their earliest experiment showed that oxytocin reduced activity of the amygdala, the part of the brain thought to make split-second friend-or-foe decisions. And Paul Zak, one of the researchers in that experiment, went on to show that inhaling oxytocin makes people more trusting and more generous.

In the latest experiment, people played the Trust Game, where an investor can give some money to a trustee in the hope that he'll return some. This time, however, they made sure the trustee kept all the money. While the subjects couldn't tell if they'd inhaled oxytocin or placebo, the oxytocin group was more likely to trust in the next round of the game.

Zak points out that women are more susceptible to oxytocin than men, due to estrogen's enhancing its effects, so women might show a stronger effect.

Science News said, "Oxytocin may help people move on after betrayal." World Science put it as, "Spray said to turn people into pushovers. Re­search­ers have iden­ti­fied brain cen­ters acti­vated by be­tray­al of trust—and a way to keep them quiet."

At least some members of the public aren't worried about that. My traffic is up today, thanks to searches for "where to buy oxytocin," I assume in response to the news. (My answer: It's not a controlled substance but it's getting more difficult to buy, no doubt due to non-scientists wanting to try it. I don't provide information about how and where to procure oxytocin.)