Oxytocin as a treatment for AS?

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Something I recently heard on the radio prompted a Google search and this popped up:

Oxytocin boosts social acuity in children with autism, study indicates

Might be a godsend for anyone who drinks at social events to counter anxiety due to AS (as I have often done).

I would be willing to try this in contrast to magnetic fields applied to the brain.

I don't recommend it to pregnant women lol!

I always wanted to try this, but I am not sure where to buy it. I read that it must be kept cool all the time, which is why it does not make sense to order it online. Plus, I do not even know whether you can get it without a prescription in the UK...

Any ideas?

seriously oxys are hard sedatives a gateway to heroin. extremely addictive and abusive. havent you seen intervention?

I believe you are confusing oxytocin with oxycontin aka hillbilly heroin.

The autism organisations here in Australia have been warning parents not use nasal oxytocin on their autistic kids until more trials are done. The current results seem to be mixed. Some success stories.

I'd volunteer as participant for another research study

Oxytocin is released when people hug/cuddle/snuggle.. I prefer to get mine from good *hugs* with even better people.

This is very much preliminary.

Basically, take some oxytocin, and the social bit of your brains lights up when you see a picture of a human.

It needs testing in the real world, for starters- but that's very subjective.

Oxytocin is involved with feelings of trust and social warmth.

If you had social anxiety, I think it could help. But some autistic people trust too much. For them, it could be dangerous.

And oxytocin has a dark side: It's associated with rejecting people who you see as different. It reinforces social clusters and in-groups.

I think it could be useful for some autistic people, but I do not think it would be useful for everyone, nor in every situation. The primary application should really be social anxiety disorder, not autism, though there's a lot of overlap between those two things.

So it really does make you NT?

I'm just kidding.

I had a similar effect on Ritalin, although I was far too hypomanic to be rejecting people.

Still, there's a part of me that wants to try oxytocin. I have got social anxiety.

I realize you're joking --but want to talk about this anyhow: No, oxytocin would not make you more NT. It doesn't actually increase your social skills; it just changes your focus. Anyone can feel the effects of oxytocin by holding a baby or cuddling a beloved pet, or if you have one, by cuddling your romantic partner.

I think that autistics are just as capable of feeling protective and connected as NTs are; it's just that we have such trouble making connections that many of us are out of practice and anxious about it. Oxytocin might make you more motivated to seek connectedness and less anxious about it, but it couldn't make you better at finding relationships or at communicating. So--it would make learning to socialize easier, kind of the way stimulants make concentrating easier. Ritalin can't teach you arithmetic; oxytocin can't teach you how to have a conversation.

All of this makes me wonder whether oxytocin has anything to do with why autistics seem to become experts in animal communication so often. Animals don't seem to reject us, because we're a different species and thus just as different as NTs. So we don't have that barrier that we have with many NTs. Oxytocin might come into it by letting us feel connected to the animals we meet, and without the complex social multi-tasking we'd have to do with humans, we find interaction with animals rewarding. Maybe that's why so many autistics find it easier to talk when they are holding or petting an animal.

But this is all speculation... I do think oxytocin is a useful avenue of research; but I don't think it is a potential cure--I don't think it could turn anyone into an NT, no more than Ritalin could cure ADHD. It might be helpful for some people, though. I hope the researchers are sensible about investigating the potential benefits and drawbacks. They shouldn't throw away something that can help us deal with socializing, just because it won't turn us into NTs.

It might turn out that the benefits of oxytocin can be entirely duplicated by working with an assistance animal. That seems to be the ideal outcome to me, since the friendly, trusting state of mind that oxytocin encourages can be quite dangerous if you trust the wrong person. Trusting an assistance dog (or cat, or lizard) tends to be quite safe.

Note to kids at home: Oxytocin is NOT the same as oxycontin.

Depends. Do autistics have a deficit in oxytocin production compared to NT's? A deficit in oxytocin production in an infant might make them not learn social cues at an important 'window of opportunity' age that NT's do. Like the ability to learn language, where we're designed to just pick it up without any effort of our own but only when we're kids, socialness could be the same. If one does not pay attention to social cues because socialness isn't rewarding as an infant, it will most likely carry on into adulthood as some sort of social deficit, not unless one works very hard at overcoming it.
Of course this would only make sense if oxytocin is indeed malfunctioning somehow or deficient in autistics, and from a young age. And then the 'refrigerator mom' theory would have more weight than we now give it, (such that a refrigerator mom could in fact, cause autism, even if all causes of autism weren't from cold mothers.) And it also seems unlikely that oxytocin would help other executive function problems that have nothing to do with socializing.

If it were just oxytocin, you'd expect that autistic kids would have attachment problems (they don't; they're securely attached at the same rate as NTs), would have symptoms identical to RAD (they don't), and would not have significant sensory and cognitive problems.

Hmmm. I had to have an oxytocin drip in order to deliver both of my children. Since I knew that oxytocin also promotes bonding between parent and child, I always wondered if my inability to produce enough of it naturally was caused by (or was a cause of) autism. I'm glad to see that someone is looking into that idea.

Oxytocin Found to Stimulate Social Brain Regions in Children With Autism

By PAM BELLUCK
Published: December 2, 2013

The hormone oxytocin has been generating excitement — and caution — among people who care about autism.

Scientists have been eager to see if oxytocin, which plays a role in emotional bonding, trust and many biological processes, can improve social behavior in people with autism. Some parents of children with autism have asked doctors to prescribe it, although it is not an approved treatment for autism, or have purchased lower-dose versions of the drug over the counter.

Scientifically, the jury is out, and experts say parents should wait until more is known. Some studies suggest that oxytocin, sometimes called the “love hormone,” improves the ability to empathize and connect socially, and may decrease repetitive behaviors. Others find little or no impact, and some research suggests that it can promote clannish and competitive feelings, or exacerbate symptoms in people already oversensitive to social cues. Importantly, nobody knows if oxytocin is safe or desirable to use regularly or long term.

Now, the first study of how oxytocin affects the brains of children with autism finds hints of promise — and also suggestions of what its limitations might be.

On the promising side, the small study, published Monday in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that the hormone, given as an inhalant, generated increased activity in parts of the brain involved in social connection. This suggests not only that oxytocin can stimulate social brain areas, but also that in children with autism these brain regions are not irrevocably damaged but are plastic enough to be influenced.

The limitations could include a finding that oxytocin prompted greater brain activity in children with the least severe autism. Some experts said that this could imply that oxytocin may work primarily in less-impaired people, but others said it might simply suggest that different doses are needed.

“Here we have a really clear demonstration that oxytocin is affecting brain activity in people with autism,” said Dr. Linmarie Sikich, director of the Adolescent and School-Age Psychiatric Intervention Research Program at the University of North Carolina, who was not involved in the study. “What this shows is that the brains of people with autism aren’t incapable of responding in a more typical social way.”

Nonetheless, said Dr. Sikich, who will be leading a large federally funded trial of 300 children to evaluate behavioral effects of daily oxytocin for six or 12 months, “there’s still a big gap in knowing how much it will really change overall functioning and how to best use it.”

In the new study, conducted by the Yale Child Study Center, 17 children, ages 8 to 16, all with mild autism, got a spray of oxytocin or a placebo (researchers did not know which, and in another session each child received the other substance). The children were placed in a functional magnetic resonance imaging machine, an f.M.R.I., and given a well-established test of social-emotional perception: matching emotions to photographs of people’s eyes. They took a similar test involving objects, choosing if photos of fragments of vehicles corresponded to cars, trucks, and so on.

During the “eyes” test, brain areas involved in social functions like empathy and reward — less active in children with autism — showed more activity after taking oxytocin than after placebo. Also, during the “vehicles” tests, oxytocin decreased activity in those brain areas more than the placebo, a result that especially excited some experts.

“If you can decrease their attention to a shape or object so you can get them to pay attention to a social stimulus, that’s a big thing,” said Deborah A. Fein, a psychology professor at the University of Connecticut.

With oxytocin, the children did not do better on the social-emotional test, unlike in some other studies. But experts said that was not surprising, given the difficulty of answering challenging questions while staying still in an f.M.R.I.

“What I would look for is more evidence of looking in the eyes of parents, more attention to what parents are saying, less tendency to lecture parents on their National Geographic collection,” Dr. Fein said.

The Yale researchers did study oxytocin’s effect on such social interactions and are analyzing those results for later publication, said Ilanit Gordon, a co-author of the study.

The Yale team suggests that oxytocin may be most useful not as a continuous treatment to enhance general social skills, but as a tool to help children benefit more from behavioral therapy or specific social experiences.

Several experts agreed.

“Most people believe that these drugs will not immediately improve social behavior or improve some of the more negative symptoms,” said Geraldine Dawson, director of the Center for Autism Diagnosis and Treatment at Duke University. Instead, “Think of this as possibly priming the brain to make it more receptive to social information,” she said. “This may help to enhance that child’s response to behavioral therapy and early intervention, and may not have to be used long term.”

The Yale study includes another intriguing result: that children whose saliva showed higher oxytocin concentrations had more activity in the amygdala. That, experts said, may eventually mean that a simple saliva test could help identify who might benefit most from oxytocin.

There is more here>> http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/03/healt ... &src=rechp