London, Feb 17 (Inditop.com) Autism is a condition characterised by difficulties in communicating effectively with other people and developing social relationships. Now, researchers have shown that the hormone oxytocin can improve the ability of autistic patients to interact with others.
The team was led by Angela Sirigu at the Centre de Neuroscience Cognitive (CNRS) in Lyon (France). Oxytocin promotes delivery and lactation. It plays a crucial role in enhancing social and emotional behaviour.
Previous studies that measured the levels of this hormone in the blood of patients showed that it was deficient in those with autism.
Researchers administered oxytocin to autistic patients and then observed their social behaviour during ball games and during visual tests designed to identify ability to recognise faces expressing different feelings.
Sirigu’s team advanced the hypothesis that a deficit in oxytocin might be implicated in the social problems experienced by autistic subjects.
The team examined whether administering oxytocin could improve social behaviour of individuals with high-functioning autism (HFA) or Asperger syndrome (AS).
In both these forms of autism, patients retain normal intellectual and linguistic skills but are unable to engage spontaneously in social situations. Thus, during a conversation, these patients turn their heads and avoid eye contact with other people.
First of all, researchers observed the social behaviour of the patients while they were interacting with three other people during a ball tossing game.
Three profiles were represented: a player who always returned the ball to the patient, a player who did not return the ball, and finally a player who indiscriminately returned the ball to the patient or to other players.
Each time the patient received the ball, he or she won a sum of money. The game was restarted 10 times in order to allow the patient to identify the different profiles of his/her partners and act accordingly.
Under a placebo, the patients returned the ball indiscriminately to the three partners. However, patients treated with oxytocin were able to discriminate between the different profiles and returned the ball to the most cooperative partner.
The scientists also measured the patients’ degree of attentiveness to social signals by asking them to look at series of photographs of faces. Under a placebo, the patients looked at the mouth or away from the photo.
But after inhaling oxytocin, the patients displayed a higher level of attentiveness to facial stimuli: they looked at the faces, and indeed it was even possible to see an increase in the number of times they looked specifically at the eyes of the faces in the photographs.
The results of these tests thus showed that the administration of oxytocin allowed autistic patients to adjust to their social context by identifying the differing behaviours displayed by those around them and then acted accordingly, demonstrating more trust in the most socially cooperative individuals.
These findings were published Feb 15 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
