Trial reportProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
Common and dissociable effects of oxytocin and lorazepam on the neurocircuitry of fear.
Trial report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 17 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
17 citing papers in PubMed, 34 citations in OpenAlex.
- Oxytocin Reduces Subjective Fear in Naturalistic Social Contexts via Enhancing Top-Down Middle Cingulate Amygdala Regulation and Brain-Wide Fear Representations.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2025Trial
- Acute lorazepam administration does not significantly affect moral attitudes or judgments.Scientific reports · 2025Trial
- Effects of exogenous oxytocin and estradiol on resting-state functional connectivity in women and men.Scientific reports · 2023Trial
- Oxytocinergic Modulation of Stress-Associated Amygdala-Hippocampus Pathways in Humans Is Mediated by Serotonergic Mechanisms.The international journal of neuropsychopharmacology · 2022Trial
- Oxazepam and cognitive reappraisal: A randomised experiment.PloS one · 2021Trial
- Eye-Tracking Reveals a Role of Oxytocin in Attention Allocation Towards Familiar Faces.Frontiers in endocrinology · 2021Trial
- An Honest Reckoning With the Amygdala and Mental Illness.The American journal of psychiatry · 2024Review
- Negative emotionality downregulation affects moral choice but not moral judgement of harm: a pharmacological study.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Post-traumatic stress disorder: the role of the amygdala and potential therapeutic interventions - a review.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2024Review
- Oxytocin-a social peptide? Deconstructing the evidence.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
- Roles of Oxytocin in Stress Responses, Allostasis and Resilience.International journal of molecular sciences · 2021Review
- Oxytocin and the Neurobiology of Prosocial Behavior.The Neuroscientist : a review journal bringing neurobiology, neurology and psychiatry · 2021Review
- Aging, Social Distancing, and COVID-19 Risk: Who is more Vulnerable and Why?Aging and disease · 2021Review
- Oxytocin and Fear Memory Extinction: Possible Implications for the Therapy of Fear Disorders?International journal of molecular sciences · 2021Review
- Limbic Neuropeptidergic Modulators of Emotion and Their Therapeutic Potential for Anxiety and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2021Review
- Molecular and neurocircuitry mechanisms of social avoidance.Cellular and molecular life sciences : CMLS · 2021Review
- Oxytocin Promotes Accurate Fear Discrimination and Adaptive Defensive Behaviors.Frontiers in neuroscience · 2020Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
14 authors at 5 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Benzodiazepines (BZDs) represent the gold standard of anxiolytic pharmacotherapy; however, their clinical benefit is limited by side effects and addictive potential. Consequently, there is an urgent need to develop novel and safe anxiolytics. The peptide hormone oxytocin (OXT) exhibits anxiolytic-like properties in animals and humans, but whether OXT and BZDs share similar effects on the neural circuitry of fear is unclear. Therefore, the rationale of this ultra-high-field functional MRI (fMRI) study was to test OXT against the clinical comparator lorazepam (LZP) with regard to their neuromodulatory effects on local and network responses to fear-related stimuli. One hundred twenty-eight healthy male participants volunteered in this randomized double-blind, placebo-controlled, between-group study. Before scanning using an emotional face-matching paradigm, participants were randomly administered a single dose of OXT (24 IU), LZP (1 mg), or placebo. On the behavioral level, LZP, but not OXT, caused mild sedation, as evidenced by a 19% increase in reaction times. On the neural level, both OXT and LZP inhibited responses to fearful faces vs. neutral faces within the centromedial amygdala (cmA). In contrast, they had different effects on intra-amygdalar connectivity; OXT strengthened the coupling between the cmA and basolateral amygdala, whereas LZP increased the interplay between the cmA and superficial amygdala. Furthermore, OXT, but not LZP, enhanced the coupling between the cmA and the precuneus and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex. These data implicate inhibition of the cmA as a common denominator of anxiolytic action, with only OXT inducing large-scale connectivity changes of potential therapeutic relevance.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.