Oxytocin: A Potential Treatment for Alzheimer’s
Written By: Pimtawan Jatupornpakdee
July 30, 2020
Our body secretes various types of hormones to function in our daily life. One of the hormones our body secretes is oxytocin, or the so-called “love hormone.” Oxytocin originates in the thalamus in our brain. Its job is to aid childbirth, breastfeeding, and relationships. Because oxytocin relates to social bonding, researchers suggest that it may also help treat social anxiety and autism. Other than that, a previous study in mice have found that oxytocin can improve long-term spatial learning and memory. From the results from the study, researchers at Tokyo University of Science in Japan and Kitasato University questioned whether oxytocin could protect nerve cells in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.
Alzheimer’s disease is a form of dementia most commonly found in humans. More than 5.5 million people in the United States are struggling with this disease. The symptoms for Alzheimer’s is progessive loss of memory and cognitive decline. A theory proposes that a clump of protein called beta-amyloid in the brain causes this disease, but some researchers still reject this theory. In one study, a researcher injected artificial beta-amyloid into rats' brains and the results showed that the rats had problems with learning and memory. In a more recent study, the researchers placed slices of a rat’s brain in a dish with beta-amyloid. It turns out beta-amyloid inhibits “long-term potentiation” (LTP). LTP occurs when nerves fire simultaneously, creating strong electrical connections or synapses for signals to pass. It allows nerve cells to encode new memories. Because beta-amyloid inhibits LTP, it “impairs nerve cells’ capacity to strengthen their synapses.” This also causes vulnerable damage to the hippocampus, which is in charge of memory formation. Scientists refer to this as “plasticity.”
Later, researchers have discovered that oxytocin can reverse this impairment. They conducted another experiment to test their theory. Like the previous study, scientists placed slices of a rat's brain in a dish with beta-amyloid. However, this time they pretreated the brain with a chemical that blocked oxytocin receptors. The result was as expected. “Oxytocin was no longer able to restore the nerve cells’ lost plasticity.”
From the experiment, scientists suggest that oxytocin can be a potential treatment for Alzheimer's disease. “Our study puts forth the interesting possibility that oxytocin could be a novel therapeutic modality for the treatment of memory loss associated with cognitive disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease,” says Professor Saitoh, the study leader.
However, Alzheimer’s is more complex than that. It would require a lot more experiments and research in order for us to completely understand how oxytocin can be used as treatment.
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