Hug the Monkey

Oxytocin Could Be Weaponized, Expert Warns

Malcolm Dando's op-ed piece in Nature this week has gotten attention for his warning that biologists seldom understand the military implications of their research.

Analee Newitz on io9 quotes Dando using oxytocin sprays as an example of this:

Some companies are already marketing oxytocin on the back of studies showing that a nasal squirt of the hormone increases trust in humans. Even though the effectiveness of commercial sprays is doubtful, such research opens up the possibility of a drug that could be used to manipulate people's emotions in a military context. Discussions with more than 2,000 practising life scientists in 13 countries over the past few years have taught me that few have considered such possible uses of their work.

Red Orbit has another article about Dando's op-ed.

In writing my book about oxytocin's role in human emotion, I spoke to most of the top oxytocin researchers. They were well aware about people's self-experimentation. Sue Carter of the University of Illinois said at that their clinic, which treats kids with autism spectrum disorder, many parents told her they'd tried over-the-counter oxytocin sprays, or else asked about it.

Awareness of the issue of self-dosing and entrepreneurial companies using biology research for profit and/or military weapons development isn't much use, of course. Biologists have to do the basic experimentation; the best way they can protect their research is to patent whatever they can.

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.

Partying Hearty on Oxytocin in India

 Oxytocin is the new party drug in India, according to this story from the Times of India.

I've seen previous news stories about police seizing illegal oxytocin or counterfeit versions, and wondered if this was a mistranslation and they meant oxycontin, the pain reliever. And evidently farmers often inject cows with oxytocin to increase milk production, an effect noted by Kristen Uvnas Moberg, the Swedish researcher who was the first to understand this hormone/neurochemical's powerful effects on our moods and ability to bond.

The Times explains that kids inject the oxytocin.

According to a pharmacy expert, the drug induces a numb state of mind. "After a period of intense activity and enjoyment where the addicts are numb to pain, effect of the drug wears off and the users drop, literally. It leaves the addicts’ nervous system in a mess and the users need time to recover," he said.

I dunno about this numb state of mind. They may, rather, feel very calm and connected to each other, similar to the way people who take ecstasy at raves say they feel. (It's been shown that this drug causes a release of oxytocin in the brain of mice.) Oxytocin certainly does reduce sensitivity to pain, and the "mess" side effects have been seen in people who take ecstasy frequently.

The authorities may be overstating the negative effects, as they sometimes do. Nevertheless, I do NOT advocate using oxytocin recreationally. First, because it acts in so many ways to regulate the body, messing with the natural system could have unforeseen and not pretty consequences. Second, it's dangerous to inject anything into your body if you don't have sterile equipment and know what you're doing -- especially if you can't be sure of what you're injecting.

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 Deficit Disorder

Everything that's outside the norm or seems unhealthy is considered a disorder these days. This partly reflects Big Pharma's desire to increase profits by finding new diseases it can treat. Nevertheless, I believe that recognizing some things that used to be considered character flaws or hopeless cases as disorders that might be treatable have benefited millions of people.

Now, instead of being classified as a bad or stupid kid, children who disrupt class and have trouble learning may be given the less pejorative label of ADHD. While how to help them remains controversial, with many people thinking these kids are over-medicated, many others are thankful the drugs are working.

The same thing is true with clinical depression, as well as its cousin, post-partum depression. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, can alter neurochemistry and help many sufferers lead better lives. Dario Maestripieri of the University of Chicago has shown that the kind of mothering a baby rhesus macaque monkey gets influences the serotonin levels of its brain on into adulthood. Baby rhesus with mean mothers show symptoms of depression.

Evidence is mounting that babies and children who don't get enough or the right kind of nurturing may have abnormal brain development. This can result in an overactive stress response and an under-active oxytocin response. Similarly, some scientists are looking at abnormalities in the oxytocin system as causal factors in autism.

I think the day will come -- in the next three to five years -- when something like "oxytocin deficit disorder" will make its way into the DSM -- and into psychopharmacology. Drugs that introduce an oxytocin-like substance into the body, or increase its production by the hypothalamus or other oxytocin-producing sites, may provide a quicker fix for people who feel they can't connect emotionally with others.

What Are the Human Pheromones?

  Butt Sniffing Ying Yang 
  Originally uploaded by Tim Dorr.

This is slightly off-topic, but it fits in with the recent guest post, Sex, Love and Oxytocin: A Real Love Story.

Liquid Trust is now "enhanced with male and female pheromones." Now, the idea of human pheromones -- chemicals emitted by one animal that change the physiology or behavior of others of that species -- is not accepted science at this point. There have been a few studies that I find really convincing, and I'd bet that this is another case where we're not so different from the rest of the animal kingdom.

At any rate, I saw a mention of human pheromones in this article, which led me to a pretty good, science-based discussion of human pheromones: Y2K Man and Pheromonal Communication. According to the author, F. Ligabue Stricker, the human pheromones are (or are thought to be) androstenol-androstenone for men and copulin for women.

... in women were found compounds similar to “copulin” detected in Primates (Michael et al. 1971, 1974). Copulin is a blend of aliphatic acids (acetic, propionic, butyric,, isovaleric, isocaproic.) usually present in vaginal fluids of healthy women. They are under hormonal control and their fluctuations during the menstrual cycle communicate the ovulatory period (Mc Clintock, 1971). As in Primates,in fact, near the middle of the menstrual cycle their concentration is higher. The use of hormonal contraceptives reduces the production of copulin and its fluctuations.

In Man the “ musky “ odour ” (Kloek 1961), is due to metabolites of androstenone and androstenol, typically pheromonal substances produced by the testes and present with high concentration in urine, saliva and axillary sweat. The effect on social interactions is more constant and stronger than copulin one (Kirk-Smith 1978).. The higher intensity of the male odour compared to female odour is due to greater amounts of skin secretions and concomitantly more odorogenic microflora.

So, these are likely what's in Liquid Trust. I still wonder if there's enough of anything in this product to make a difference and if there is, how long it lasts after you open the bottle. 

But, if you want to buy it anyway, buy by clicking the link below and the company will pay me for the ad:

Oxytocin to Treat Social Anxiety Disorder

A Monash University prof has won a $100,000 grant for a two-year study of the use of inhaled oxytocin to treat social anxiety disorder.

Social anxiety disorder, or SAD, is also known as social phobia. It's a subset of generalized anxiety disorder. With SAD, you feel crippling anxiety and dread when faced with social occasions of all kinds: going to a party, even going to work or to school, speaking up at a meeting, eating at a restaurant.

It's an extremely common anxiety disorder, and it hampers your ability to succeed in life and in relationships.

Pradeep Nathan, an associate professor in the School of Psychology, Psychiatry and Psychological Medicine at Monash in Australia, will begin recruiting subjects for his study.

His theory is that, because people with SAD have -- among other things -- shown abnormal reactivity in the amygdala, the part of the brain that processes emotions, especially the negative ones of fear and anger, and oxytocin calms the amygdala, inhaling some should reduce the symptoms.

The problem with oxytocin inhalants as drugs to treat pervasive, continuing conditions like social phobia is that its effects don't last very long, and the oxytocin stings pretty badly when you inhale it. Some companies, including Nastech, are working on longer-lasting inhalants using oxytocin or carbetocin, a synthetic form.

For you anxious Aussies who might want to participate, you can reach Nathan and PhD student Izelle Labuschagne at Pradeep.Nathan at med.monash.edu.au or Izelle.Labuschagne at med.monash.edu.au or +61 3 990 53952.

Better Than Human

If you could control your emotions with pills, what would you choose to do?

Most people would likely ask for a pill that made them happier and gave them more love in their lives. The intense interest in oxytocin as a drug comes, I think, from feelings of loneliness and disconnection that many of us have.

If that's so, we would probably use oxytocin drugs to connect more deeply with others. That's the premise of a paper by J. Hughes, executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies. In "Virtue Engineering: Applications of Neurotechnology to Improve Moral Behavior," he disagrees with those who fear that psychoactive pharmaceuticals will make us self-absorbed emotional zombies.

He says, "Contrary to the bioconservative accusation that neurological self-determination and human enhancement will encourage more selfishness in society, it will probably permit people to be even more moral and responsible than they currently are."

The transhumanist ideal is to be able to reshape ourselves to be better humans, not worse ones, Hughes explains. For example, just a you might use a nicotine patch to help you stop smoking if willpower isn't enough, you could use a patch that would help you keep homophobic impulses to yourself.

Besides, there's evidence that endogenous oxytocin can help us learn new responses that become permanent without continual dosing. In Eric Hollander and Jennifer Bartz's experiments giving oxytocin to autistic adults, they were better able to identify the emotional tone of language not only while they were under the effects of the drug, but for weeks afterward. (For more on this, see Oxytocin Therapy for Autism Gets Closer.)

Because the brain can form new connections throughout our life, practicing connection and love while under the influence of oxytocin could help us learn how to do it every day, forever.

Oxytocin Could Be Productized in Five Years

Markus Heinrichs, the University of Zurich researcher who has led or been involved in many of the "trust studies" in which oxytocin proved in the laboratory to increase trust in economic and social situations, evidently dropped a little bombshell at a neuroscience conference this week.

According to ShortNews, Heinrichs told the World Congress of Neuroscience about a test in which 70 adults inhaled oxytocin. They felt more self-confident and less shy.

Heinrichs supposedly told the scientific audience that he'll do a larger trial and, if all goes well, such a product could reach the market in the next five years.

Paul Zak, the Claremont Graduate School economist who recently received a grant to study trust in economic exchanges, worked with Heinrichs' team on some of the studies underlying this promised drug.

Of course, such a drug is available today. OxyCalm is a low-dose oxytocin nasal spray freely available over the internet.

See also "Oxytocin Patent Just in Time" and "Oxytocin, Trust and Greed."