Love by Shaira Dela Peña
Oxytocin is commonly known as the love drug or love hormone. This is due to the fact that it is a natural hormone that helps establish bonds between mother and child. Although it helps establish family bonds, it also is responsible in part for learning by association, regulation of other reproductive hormones, regulating the rewarding stimulation in our brain, and influencing our responses to memories and stress. According to Moeini and colleagues, this is the part that allows the hormone to be capable of helping someone recover from an addiction.
Addiction is an unrelenting downward spiral which keeps its victims from ever even considering other options. Given the motivation and chance, substance abuse can be treated in many ways with the most basic of which is to simply abstain from the substance. This however produces a lot of withdrawal symptoms which, on the whole, prevent someone’s desire and even their ability to cut back on addictive opiates for example. The worst of the opiate withdrawal symptoms noted by Moeini et. Al. include irritability, anxiety, stress, drug-seeking behaviors, and a general dissatisfaction with themselves and the environment known as dysphoria.
Oxytocin has shown to be a regulator of different neural systems and aids in the rebalancing of chemical signals in our brain. In particular it influences the reward system involving the rewarding neurotransmitter, dopamine, which provides strong motivations to act. Oxytocin can therefore in theory influence the addictive traits in the brain and be used in treatments. Moeini et. al. conduct clinical trials on male Iranian patients with a dependency on heroin to see if administered oxytocin can help specifically with coping with withdrawal over seven to nine days. They do so using a randomized double blind placebo experiment. A double blind test means that neither the test patient nor the researcher know (in the moment) who is getting treatment and who is getting a placebo, or false, treatment. The treatment involves oxytocin given to the patient through their nose while the control group, or placebo group, simply got an equal dose of harmless saline solution.
Before administering the treatments, the patients’ stress hormone, cortisol, is measured along with another named DHEA. DHEA works to lessen cortisol’s stress effects and actually improve adaptation to stress. Their ratio can therefore be used as a reference to how a patient might be experiencing a stressful event such as withdrawal. Measuring this ratio before and after the administration of oxytocin each day can show the acute effects on the individual. In addition the patients were scored on addiction exams such as drug desire questionnaire and clinical opioid withdrawal scale. These tests were done to measure the effects of the oxytocin treatments versus the placebo treatments over time and compare how it influenced their withdrawal symptoms.
Moeini et. Al. find that the oxytocin is actually able to lower cortisol levels relative to the DHEA levels in the blood suggesting less stress might be experienced temporarily. This is supported by the reported answers given by the patients in their conducted written or visual exams. In general, they responded with a significant decrease in desires to seek out drugs, visual drug responses, and withdrawal stressors. Anxiety however was not significantly changed by the treatment and as such indicate that this treatment would best accompany other treatment types and some sort of anxiety coping treatment or therapy.
Oxytocin is an invaluable addiction treatment avenue as shown by this study and others. It influences a wide arrange of neural systems and is able to disrupt the cyclic nature of drug addiction. Due to this it is suspected to be able to help many different varying addictions at varying stages in the addiction cycle. Like many psychological treatments, it would work best in conjunction with other treatments to round out the weaknesses this treatment might have in lessening the anxiety experience by withdrawal. While oxytocin’s involvement in social relationships doesn’t prove a conversation will work as addiction therapy, don’t forget to show some love to all those important people around us this Valentine’s Day.
In Depth
Overall the study is a helpful step for those who struggle with addiction and this type of treatment can enable their recovery. As such it is important to detail the ability of the hormone in treating this disorder. The demographic are not very diverse and is a small sample set. A wider sample set allows different ethnicities and genes to be studied to truly understand how it would effect the general population. In addition there were no female patients in the study. The researchers acknowledge this but it is still important to discuss as they also dictate the wide application possible. Despite this, they do show the significant effects of oxytocin on withdrawal symptoms. These findings are backed by many other studies and is referenced in review articles some of which were used to supplement the information in this article (Bowen, 2017).
Bowen, M. T., & Neumann, I. D. (2017). Rebalancing the addicted brain: oxytocin interference with the neural substrates of addiction. Trends in neurosciences, 40(12), 691-708.Chicago
Moeini, Mina & Omidi, Abdoallah & Sehat, Mojtaba & Banafshe, Hamid. (2019). The Effects of Oxytocin on Withdrawal, Craving and Stress Response in Heroin-Dependent Patients: A Randomized, Double-Blind Clinical Trial. European Addiction Research. 25. 41-47. 10.1159/000496194.
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