In the study of the relationship between structure and biological activity in the neurohypophysial hormones, oxytocin and vasopressin, attention has recently been focused in this and other laboratories on the chemical functional groups. Aside from peptide linkages, these chemical functional groups in oxytocin consist of a primary amino, a phenolic hydroxyl, three carboxamide groups, and a disul...

BACKGROUND. Oxytocin is a well known drug most commonly used in obstetrics for induction or augmentation of labor. Due to its essential role in labor, and the overall effect in the body, oxytocin must be deeply understood by all obstetricians who use it and prescribe it. There is relevant data listed about oxytocin and has reviewed the evidence in 31 full text articles of indexed journals betwe...

The oxytocin receptor has been implicated in the regulation of reproductive physiology as well as social and emotional behaviors. The neurochemical mechanisms by which oxytocin receptor modulates social and emotional behavior remains elusive, in part because of a lack of sensitive and selective antibodies for cellular localization. To more precisely characterize oxytocin receptor-expressing neu...

BACKGROUND The endocrinology of skeletal muscle is highly complex and many issues about hormone action in skeletal muscle are still unresolved. Aim of the work is to improve our knowledge on the relationship between skeletal muscle and 17β-estradiol. METHODS The skeletal muscle cell line C2C12 was treated with 17β-estradiol, the oxytocin peptide and a combination of the two hormones. The mRNA...

Oxytocin is a major neuropeptide that modulates the brain functions involved in social behaviour and interaction. Despite of the importance of oxytocin for the neural control of social behaviour, little is known about the molecular mechanism(s) by which oxytocin secretion in the brain is regulated. Pro-oxytocin is synthesised in the cell bodies of hypothalamic neurones in the supraoptic and par...

Previous evidence in an animal model of drug self-administration and drug seeking showed that acute oxytocin decreased methamphetamine (meth) seeking in male rats, suggesting potential clinical efficacy for the treatment of psychostimulant addiction. However, based on the well-established role of oxytocin in reproduction and pair bond formation, it is important to know how this effect extrapola...

BACKGROUND Studies have suggested that patients with schizophrenia are impaired at recognizing emotions. Recently, it has been shown that the neuropeptide oxytocin can have beneficial effects on social behaviors. METHOD To examine emotion recognition deficits in patients and see whether oxytocin could improve these deficits, we carried out two experiments. In the first experiment we recruited...

Dogs have been shown to excel in reading human social cues, including facial cues. In the present study we used eye-tracking technology to further study dogs' face processing abilities. It was found that dogs discriminated between human facial regions in their spontaneous viewing pattern and looked most to the eye region independently of facial expression. Furthermore dogs played most attention...

OBJECTIVE Induction of labor (IOL), using intravenous oxytocin, is the artificial initiation of labor before its spontaneous onset for the purpose of delivery of the fetoplacental unit. Although there are various studies looking at dosages of oxytocin, only a few have addressed the issue of discontinuation of oxytocin in the active stage of labor. Thus, our study was conducted to evaluate the n...

Oxytocin either increases or inhibits cell growth in different cell subtypes. We tested here the effect of oxytocin on cell proliferation and migration of human dermal microvascular endothelial cells (HMEC) and tumor-associated endothelial cells purified from human breast carcinomas (B-TEC). Oxytocin receptors were expressed in both cell subtypes at mRNA and protein levels. Through oxytocin rec...