'Love hormone' oxytocin may help battle stress

According to new research a hormone that relaxes women during childbirth and breastfeeding has other uses.

It seems a small squirt of oxytocin lowered stress levels in both men and women who were quarrelling.

Oxytocin, has previously been linked with the ability to maintain healthy interpersonal relationships and healthy psychological boundaries with other people.

Beate Ditzen, now a psychologist at Emory University in Atlanta, says the results suggest the drug could be used to help battle stress and, possibly, reduce conflict.

Ditzen and colleagues at the University of Fribourg tested 50 heterosexual couples, asking them to discuss a subject that they often disagreed about.

Half the couples first got a nasal spray of a medical preparation of oxytocin and half got a dummy spray and the couples were then encouraged to fight out their differences while being videotaped.

Ditzen says the hormone appears to cut stress during tense social situations or conflict and supports work done with rodents, as well as in primates such as monkeys, which suggests that oxytocin affects sexual relationships among animals.

Ditzen says the couples who received oxytocin appeared better able to express their emotions, both negative and positive and more openly, than those who received a placebo.

The researchers suggest that oxytocin has a positive effect but advise caution about reaching final conclusions until all the data is analyzed.

Other research suggests oxytocin may be the culprit in those with a sweet tooth, as a deficiency has been spotted as a contributing factor in an animal study.

Dr. Janet Amico a professor of medicine and pharmaceutical sciences at the University of Pittsburgh and colleagues have found in a study with mice that a lack of the hormone fosters a hankering for sweets and oxytocin may well be to blame for sugar cravings.

Whether oxytocin has the same effect in humans is not yet known, but the investigators hope to extend these studies to people in order to discern if abnormalities in the production of oxytocin may lead to an excessive need for sweet-tasting substances in humans.

The research was presented at the International Congress of Neuroendocrinology at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Centre.