Department of Psychology, Islamic Azad University, Karaj Branch, Karaj, Iran.
Neurosciences Research Centre, Tabriz University of Medical Sciences, Tabriz, Iran.
J Psychiatr Res. 2022 Oct;154:80-90. doi: 10.1016/j.jpsychires.2022.06.033. Epub 2022 Aug 4.
Oxytocin (OXT) is a hypothalamic neuropeptide that is released from the posterior pituitary gland and at specific targets in the central nervous system (CNS). The prosocial effects of OXT acting in the CNS present it as a potential therapeutic agent for the treatment of aspects of autism spectrum disorder (ASD). In this article, we systematically review the functional MRI (fMRI) literature that reports task-state and resting-state fMRI (rsfMRI) studies of the neural effects of single or multiple dose intranasal OXT (IN-OXT) administration in individuals with ASD.
We searched four databases for relevant documents (PubMed, Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar) using the keywords "autism spectrum disorder", "Asperger Syndrome", "oxytocin", and "fMRI". Moreover, we made a manual search to assess the quality of our automatic search. The search was confined to English language articles published in the interval February 2013 until March 2021.
The search yielded 12 fMRI studies with OXT intervention, including 288 individuals with ASD (age 8-55 years) enrolled in randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, parallel designs, within-subject-crossover experimental OXT trials. Studies reporting activation task and rsfMRI were summarized with region of interest (ROI) or whole-brain voxel wise analysis. The systematic review of the 12 studies supported the proposition that IN-OXT administration alters brain activation in individuals with ASD. The effects of IN-OXT interacted with the type of the task and the overall results did not indicate restoration of normal brain activation in ASD signature regions albeit the lack of statistical evidence.
A large body of evidence consistently indicates that OXT alters activation to fMRI in brain networks of individuals with ASD, but with uncertain implications for alleviation of their social deficits.
催产素（OXT）是一种下丘脑神经肽，由垂体后叶释放，并在中枢神经系统（CNS）的特定靶标发挥作用。OXT 在中枢神经系统中的亲社会作用使其成为治疗自闭症谱系障碍（ASD）某些方面的潜在治疗剂。在本文中，我们系统地回顾了报告单剂量或多剂量鼻内催产素（IN-OXT）给药对 ASD 个体的神经影响的任务态和静息态功能磁共振成像（rsfMRI）研究的功能磁共振成像（fMRI）文献。
我们使用“自闭症谱系障碍”、“阿斯伯格综合征”、“催产素”和“fMRI”等关键词，在四个数据库（PubMed、Web of Science、Scopus 和 Google Scholar）中搜索相关文献。此外，我们还进行了手动搜索以评估我们自动搜索的质量。搜索仅限于 2013 年 2 月至 2021 年 3 月期间以英文发表的文章。
该搜索共产生了 12 项关于催产素干预的 fMRI 研究，包括 288 名年龄在 8-55 岁的 ASD 个体，他们参加了随机、双盲、安慰剂对照、平行设计的、个体内交叉实验性 OXT 试验。对报告激活任务和 rsfMRI 的研究进行了总结，采用感兴趣区（ROI）或全脑体素分析。对这 12 项研究的系统综述支持了以下观点，即 IN-OXT 给药会改变 ASD 个体的大脑激活。IN-OXT 的作用与任务类型相互作用，尽管缺乏统计证据，但总体结果并未表明 ASD 特征区域的大脑激活恢复正常。
大量证据一致表明，OXT 会改变 ASD 个体的 fMRI 脑网络激活，但对减轻其社交缺陷的影响尚不确定。
