New study challenges role of ‘love hormone’ in relationships

It’s official: It’s not just one hormone. New research challenges the key role of oxytocin, the so-called “love hormone” in social bonding.

Recent research in peer-reviewed journals neuron Born without the ability to respond to oxytocin, prairie voles have shown to form strong bonds with their peers and young.

“Oxytocin may be an important player, but it’s not the only game in town,” said study author Nirao Shah. quirks and quarks Host Bob McDonald.

Much of the research on oxytocin’s function in mating bonding has involved prairie voles. They are one of the very few mammals that, like humans, can enter into long-term, exclusive relationships, raise children together, and even grieve the loss of a spouse. And oxytocin has been thought to be a key component of many of these behaviors in both voles and humans.

Researchers have previously studied what happens when the signal from oxytocin is disrupted in the brain of voles using a drug that blocks the oxytocin receptor (a type of molecular door that accepts the hormone). It was devastating: those who had litters lost their puppies to starvation.

Rather than block the oxytocin ‘door’, researchers at Stanford University decided to see what would happen if voles were born with brains without that door in the first place.

Researchers CRISPR gene editing technology Remove oxytocin receptors in vole embryos.

Shah, a professor of psychiatry, neurobiology, obstetrics and gynecology, said, “The advantage of genetics, especially the CRISPR technique used, is that it only modifies the oxytocin receptor pathway and not anywhere else.” It’s like molecular scissors that don’t add anything.” at Stanford University.

They then observed how voles behaved with each other and around rodents with an intact oxytocin receptor system. In particular, scientists looked for pair bonding behavior. Groups in which voles snuggled up to mates for long periods of time were included, showing that voles clearly prefer hanging out with their chosen mates over other rodents.

The results shocked scientists.

“Surprisingly, these animals, completely lacking oxytocin receptors, exhibited, for all intents and purposes, perfectly normal social attachment behavior,” Shah said.

“We’ve tried different methods to test this, and the voles are just as strong as their normal counterparts,” said study co-author Devanand Manoli, a psychiatric researcher at the University of California, San Francisco. He showed social attachment with his sexual partner.” said in a press release.

Additionally, voles that lack oxytocin receptors proved to be good parents, raising their small littermates to weaning.

love finds a way

These findings provide a glimpse of how oxytocin shapes the brain mechanisms involved in social behavior, said a professor of psychiatry at Emory University in Atlanta, who was not part of the study’s research team. As part of research at the Silvio O. Conte Center for Oxytocin and Social Cognition at Emory University, Larry Young broadly explores the role of oxytocin and vasopressin in social bonding and empathy in prairie voles. I have been researching.

“It suggests that oxytocin somehow shapes brain circuits,” he said. quirks and quarks in a telephone interview. “So if you were born with it, your circuits are shaped to depend on it. It has an adaptation: it allows us to perceive social interactions without oxytocin.”

As an analogy, Young explained that there is an orchestra led by a conductor, and if the conductor is suddenly absent, the music can get out of sync. But Street, who trains without a conductor at all, can play great music even when he’s in a band.

“I think oxytocin is the conductor,” said Young.

Shah said other brain mechanisms may be at work for social bonding in prairie voles born without oxytocin receptors.

“There may be other hormonal signaling pathways that work well without oxytocin. So if you remove one, the other pathway is still there, giving you normal social attachment behavior.” I can,” he said.

Another possibility is that voles have developed another way of processing oxytocin to compensate for the missing receptor. This is because unlike rodents in previous studies whose existing oxytocin receptors were blocked by drugs, the voles in this study lacked them from birth.

These findings help advance our understanding of the role hormones like oxytocin play in vole and human behavior. Past research We have considered using oxytocin to treat social cognitive disorders such as autism spectrum disorder and schizophrenia.

“Oxytocin may be important, but just putting it back or adding more oxytocin won’t magically make you bond.

“So our understanding needs to be more nuanced. There are other players of oxytocin or other signaling pathways that need to be discovered.”