Hagan Abraham Tonny, Xu Lei, Klugah-Brown Benjamin, Li Jialin, Jiang Xi, Kendrick Keith M
MOE Key Laboratory for Neuroinformation, The Clinical Hospital of Chengdu Brain Science Institute, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China.
Front Pharmacol. 2025 Jan 6;15:1460513. doi: 10.3389/fphar.2024.1460513. eCollection 2024.
Neuroimaging studies have demonstrated that intranasal oxytocin has extensive effects on the resting state functional connectivity of social and emotional processing networks and may have therapeutic potential. However, the extent to which intranasal oxytocin modulates functional connectivity network topology remains less explored, with inconsistent findings in the existing literature. To address this gap, we conducted an exploratory data-driven study.
We recruited 142 healthy males and administered 24 IU of intranasal oxytocin or placebo in a randomized controlled double-blind design. Resting-state functional MRI data were acquired for each subject. Network-based statistical analysis and graph theoretical approaches were employed to evaluate oxytocin's effects on whole-brain functional connectivity and graph topological measures.
Our results revealed that oxytocin altered connectivity patterns within brain networks involved in sensory and motor processing, attention, memory, emotion and reward functions as well as social cognition, including the default mode, limbic, frontoparietal, cerebellar, and visual networks. Furthermore, oxytocin increased local efficiency, clustering coefficients, and small-world propensity in specific brain regions including the cerebellum, left thalamus, posterior cingulate cortex, right orbitofrontal cortex, right superior frontal gyrus, left inferior frontal gyrus, and right middle orbitofrontal cortex, while decreasing nodal path topological measures in the left and right caudate.
These findings suggest that intranasal oxytocin may produce its functional effects through influencing the integration and segregation of information flow within small-world brain networks, particularly in regions closely associated with social cognition and motivation.
神经影像学研究表明，鼻内催产素对社会和情感处理网络的静息态功能连接具有广泛影响，可能具有治疗潜力。然而，鼻内催产素对功能连接网络拓扑结构的调节程度仍有待进一步探索，现有文献中的研究结果并不一致。为填补这一空白，我们进行了一项探索性的数据驱动研究。
我们招募了142名健康男性，采用随机对照双盲设计给予他们24国际单位的鼻内催产素或安慰剂。为每位受试者采集静息态功能磁共振成像数据。采用基于网络的统计分析和图论方法来评估催产素对全脑功能连接和图拓扑测量的影响。
我们的结果显示，催产素改变了参与感觉和运动处理、注意力、记忆、情感和奖励功能以及社会认知的脑网络内的连接模式，包括默认模式网络、边缘系统、额顶叶、小脑和视觉网络。此外，催产素提高了特定脑区的局部效率、聚类系数和小世界倾向，这些脑区包括小脑、左侧丘脑、后扣带回皮质、右侧眶额皮质、右侧额上回、左侧额下回和右侧眶额中回，同时降低了左右尾状核的节点路径拓扑测量值。
这些发现表明，鼻内催产素可能通过影响小世界脑网络内信息流的整合和分离来产生其功能效应，特别是在与社会认知和动机密切相关的区域。
