Horvat-Gordon Maria, Granger Douglas A, Schwartz Eve B, Nelson Vincent J, Kivlighan Katie T
Salimetrics, LLC, State College, PA, United States.
Physiol Behav. 2005 Mar 16;84(3):445-8. doi: 10.1016/j.physbeh.2005.01.007.
The integration of oxytocin (OT) into behavioral science seems to hold considerable promise for advancing our understanding of human health and development but methodological issues restrict the measurement of OT in large studies, in everyday social settings, or when repeated sampling is required. Measuring OT in saliva could overcome many of these limitations. In this paper, we rigorously evaluate the feasibility of doing so. A series of experiments leads to the conclusion that saliva does not contain oxytocin in measurable amounts, and that OT is not a valid salivary biomarker when measured by currently available immunological methods. Levels of immuno-reactive OT in saliva are primarily due to non-specific interference with antibody-antigen binding. We can state with a high degree of certainty that measurement of OT in saliva does not yield meaningful indices of individual differences or intra-individual change.
将催产素（OT）纳入行为科学似乎有望极大地推进我们对人类健康与发展的理解，但方法学问题限制了在大型研究、日常社会环境中或需要重复采样时对OT的测量。检测唾液中的OT可以克服许多这些限制。在本文中，我们严格评估了这样做的可行性。一系列实验得出的结论是，唾液中不含可测量量的催产素，并且用目前可用的免疫学方法测量时，OT不是一种有效的唾液生物标志物。唾液中免疫反应性OT的水平主要是由于对抗体 - 抗原结合的非特异性干扰。我们可以非常确定地说，测量唾液中的OT不会产生有意义的个体差异或个体内变化指标。
