The effect of oxytocin on conduct disorder & Autism Spectrum Disorder
Research type
Research Study
Full title
The effect of intranasal oxytocin on the brain processing of antisocial adolescents with a diagnosis of conduct disorder or autism spectrum disorder, compared to healthy controls
IRAS ID
165459
Contact name
Declan Murphy
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
King's College London
Duration of Study in the UK
2 years, 0 months, 1 days
Research summary
There are some children and adolescents who behave in an antisocial way and commit crimes and suffer from what is called conduct disorder. There is evidence to suggest that a proportion of conduct disordered adolescents develop into adults with antisocial personality disorder – this means that they continue to be antisocial in their adult lives, and are more likely to commit crime.
Criminal psychopaths are such people - they have a very extreme type of personality disorder, and their personality makes them very dangerous to others. Such ‘psychopaths’ have a callous unconcern for the feelings of others. We aim to do some research into this type of person, and we propose to use a natural compound (oxytocin) that can be safely delivered via the nose and is known to increase feelings of warmth towards other people. People with autism and Asperger’s Syndrome, also find it difficult to relate to others, and we will also include these people in our study. The reasons why both sets of these individuals behave the way they do are complex, but we think that if you could increase their ability to have feelings for other people, you could significantly change the way they act towards other people.
In our study, we propose to use a natural compound (oxytocin) that can be safely delivered via a nasal spray and that is known to increase feelings of warmth and attachment towards other people. Oxytocin is a hormone produced naturally by the body but we will be using a synthetic version.
We plan to do brain scans on children and adolescents with conduct disorder as well as adults with antisocial personalities, to see how they respond to different facial expressions. We want to see if giving oxytocin will change the way their brains respond to the different facial expressions. This will give us hard scientific evidence, to see whether or not oxytocin makes a difference.
We are particularly interested in investigating conduct-disordered adolescents in this study, because our research findings may lead to the potential for developing a therapeutic intervention in emerging antisocial and psychopathic personality disorder, and this would be an ideal target population for any future intervention.
This study is important because if oxytocin does work, then it could potentially be used as a treatment for these people. Treatment of antisocial people by increasing their ability to have feelings about others, could make them safer, commit less crime, and could also significantly improve their quality of life and interpersonal relationships. For those with autism and Asperger’s, a treatment would help them to relate better to others and improve how they function in society. If oxytocin does not work, and there is something about the brains of these groups of people that means they can’t empathise with others, then we would like to use the results from this pilot study to develop a test, using oxytocin, to diagnose these disorders.
REC name
London - City & East Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
15/LO/1082
Date of REC Opinion
5 Sep 2015
REC opinion
Further Information Favourable Opinion