A few years ago, the University of Pittsburgh’s Janet Amico noticed how women she saw as patients were responding to stress and anxiety. She’d sometimes hear them talking about grabbing sweets or carbs to alleviate stress. Men, however, never seemed to talk about that. Since then, Amico, an MD professor of medicine and of pharmaceutical sciences, and Regis Vollmer, a PhD professor of pharmaceutical sciences, have shown that oxytocin, a hormone associated with maternal bonding as well as dampening the blow of stress and anxiety, could have a role in keeping us from grabbing another slice of pie. The researchers monitored the feeding behaviors of a colony of normal mice and another of genetically engineered mice without the hormone. When the researchers augmented the animals’ water with sugar, the oxytocin-deficient mice went on a binge, consuming four to five times as much water as they normally would. They also overdid it with carbohydrate-enriched water. Amico and colleagues have also identified more anxiety and greater stress responses in female, but not male, oxytocin-deficient mice versus normal mice. She has broadened her studies to explore whether the enhanced consumption of sugar and carbohydrate solutions and greater responses to stress and anxiety are somehow related.
“It’s still early to speculate,” says Amico, about the hormone’s role in humans, but the research suggests that some people’s inability to say no to dessert could stem from an oxytocin problem.
—Erica Lloyd
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