Study validates oxytocin levels in blood and suggests oxytocin may be a biomarker of anxiety

Oxytocin, sometimes dubbed “the love hormone,” can be tricky to study in humans. To conduct research on the connection between oxytocin and emotion, scientists want to assess the hormone’s levels in the brain. But sampling cerebrospinal fluid, the liquid bathing the brain, requires an invasive technique called a lumbar puncture. Measuring blood oxytocin is much easier, but some researchers have questioned whether blood oxytocin levels truly reflect what’s happening in the brain.

A new Stanford study simplifies the problem: It is the first research in children, and some of the first in any age group of humans, to indicate that blood and CSF oxytocin levels track together. The research also found a correlation between low-oxytocin and high-anxiety levels in children, adding to findings from animal studies and adult humans that have documented this oxytocin-anxiety link. The paper appears today in Molecular Psychiatry.

The researchers recruited 27 volunteers from among a group of patients who needed lumbar puncture for medical reasons. The volunteers agreed to have oxytocin levels measured in their blood and CSF, and the parents of 10 children in the study answered questions about their children’s anxiety levels. From our press release about the research:

“So many psychiatric disorders involve disruptions to social functioning,” said the study’s senior author, Karen Parker, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences. “This study helps scientifically validate the use of measuring oxytocin in the blood, and suggests that oxytocin may be a biomarker of anxiety. It raises the possibility that oxytocin could be considered as a therapeutic target across a variety of psychiatric disorders.”

Parker’s team is now conducting studies of possible therapeutic uses of oxytocin in children with autism. They recently published a paper demonstrating that autism is not a disease of oxytocin deficiency per se; instead, oxytocin levels in kids with autism fall across a broad range. The findings hint at a future in which patients’ oxytocin levels could be used to guide treatment for autism or other psychiatric or developmental disorders. As Dean Carson, PhD, the lead author of the new study, explained:

“Our belief is that there are oxytocin responders and nonresponders,” Carson said, adding that the team is now testing this hypothesis.

…“Being able to have objective measures of psychiatric illness really will enhance early diagnosis and measures of treatment outcomes,” Carson said.

Via Scope