Oxytocin (OT) neurons localized in the paraventricular nucleus (PVN) and supraoptic nucleus (SON) send fibers to the brain and spinal cord. While most previous studies have looked at the role of OT in chronic pain, few have investigated the role of OT in acute pain, particularly postoperative pain. In the present study, the role of OT in incision-induced allodynia was explored for the first tim...

The oxytocin (OT) system, critically involved in social bonding, may also impinge on spirituality, which is the belief in a meaningful life imbued with a sense of connection to a Higher Power and/or the world. Midlife male participants (N = 83) were randomly assigned to receive intranasal OT or placebo. In exploratory analyses, participants were also genotyped for polymorphisms in two genes cri...

Recently, increasing attention has been paid to the welfare of farm animals, which have been evaluated using behavioral and physiological measures. However, so far, the measures have almost always been used to estimate poor welfare. In this review, firstly we focus on how oxytocin (OT) relates to positive social behavior, pleasure, and stress tolerance, and second on which management factors st...

Oxytocin (OT) is critical for lactation and maternal care, but OT and the related nonapeptide vasopressin are important for caregiving behaviors in fathers and alloparents as well. This experiment tested the effects of vasopressin and OT on food sharing in marmoset families. We treated caregivers (parents, siblings) with intranasal vasopressin, OT, or saline, and then paired them with the young...

The involvement of oxytocin (OT) in bone metabolism is an interesting area of research that recently achieved remarkable results. Moreover, several lines of evidence have largely demonstrated that OT also participates in the regulation of energy metabolism. Hence, it has recently been determined that the posterior pituitary hormone OT directly regulates bone mass: mice lacking OT or OT receptor...

Oxytocin (OT) has been linked to social behavior in rodents, non-human primates, and adult humans, but almost nothing is known about brain OT activity in human newborns or its impact on social development. To better understand the role of OT biology in human social functioning, a multi-disciplinary, longitudinal study was conducted. Cerebral spinal fluid (CSF) OT levels from 18 human neonates w...

We have shown that vasopressinergic projections to dorsal brain stem are activated during exercise and facilitate exercise tachycardia in both trained (T) and sedentary (S) rats (Dufloth DL, Morris M, and Michelini LC. Am J Physiol Regulatory Integrative Comp Physiol 273: R1271-R1282, 1997). In the present study, we investigated whether oxytocinergic projections to the nucleus of the solitary t...

The hypothalamic neuropeptide oxytocin (OT) has received increasing attention for its role in modulating social-emotional processes across species. Previous studies on using intranasal-OT in humans point to a crucial engagement of the amygdala in the observed neuromodulatory effects of OT under task and rest conditions. However, the amygdala is not a single homogenous structure, but rather a se...

Assume A owns two secret k{bit strings. She is willing to disclose one of them to B, at his choosing, provided he does not learn anything about the other string. Conversely, B does not want A to learn which secret he chose to learn. A protocol for the above task is said to implement One-out-of-two String Oblivious Transfer, denoted (2 1){OT k. This primitive is particularly useful in a variety ...

The aim of this study was to identify clinical signs and symptoms of ovarian torsion (OT) in children and to develop a simple predictive score.A chart review of patients with acute adnexal pathologies treated at the University Children's Hospital Basel, Switzerland, between March 2006 and June 2015 was performed. Medical records were screened for demographic and clinical data. These included cl...