High quality Oxytocin in stock

Oxytocin may play a role in autism and may be an effective treatment for autism's repetitive and affiliative behaviors. Oxytocin treatments also resulted in an increased retention of affective speech in adults with autism. Two related studies in adults, in 2003 and 2007, found oxytocin decreased repetitive behaviors and improved interpretation of emotions. More recently, intranasal administration of oxytocin was found to increase emotion recognition in children as young as 12 who are diagnosed with autism spectrum disorders.

Oxytocin and the Gastro Tract

Oxytocin is destroyed in the gastrointestinal tract, so must be administered by as nasal spray. It has a half-life of typically about three minutes in the blood, and given intravenously does not enter the brain in significant quantities - it is excluded from the brain by the blood-brain barrier. Evidence in rhesus macaques indicates oxytocin by nasal spray does enter the brain. Oxytocin nasal sprays have been used to stimulate breastfeeding, but the efficacy of this approach is doubtful.

Neural Sources of Oxytocin

In the hypothalamus, oxytocin is made in magnocellular neurosecretory cells of the supraoptic and paraventricular nuclei, and is stored in Herring bodies at the axon terminals in the posterior pituitary. Oxytocin is also made by some neurons in the paraventricular nucleus that project to other parts of the brain and to the spinal cord.Depending on the species, oxytocin receptor-expressing cells are located in other areas, including the amygdala and bed nucleus of the stria terminalis. In the pituitary gland, oxytocin is packaged in large, dense-core vesicles, where it is bound to neurophysin I. Secretion of oxytocin from the neurosecretory nerve endings is regulated by the electrical activity of the oxytocin cells in the hypothalamus.

Non-neural sources of Oxytocin

Outside the brain, oxytocin-containing cells have been identified in several diverse tissues, including the corpus luteum, the interstitial cells of Leydig, the retina, the adrenal medulla, the placenta, the thymus and the pancreas. The finding of significant amounts of this classically "neurohypophysial" outside the central nervous system raises many questions regarding its possible importance in these different tissues. The Leydig cells in some species have also been shown to possess the biosynthetic machinery to manufacture testicular oxytocin de novo, to be specific, in rats (which can synthesize vitamin C endogenously), and in guinea pigs, which, like humans, require an exogenous source of vitamin C (ascorbate).